May, 01 2015, 02:45pm EDT
ACLU of Maryland Statement on Charges Filed Against Officers in Death of Freddie Gray
The following can be attributed to Susan Goering, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland:
BALTIMORE
The following can be attributed to Susan Goering, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland:
"For years, victims of police violence, overwhelmingly Black, have sought justice to no avail. Today Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby announced that the state is pursuing criminal charges against the officers involved in the brutal death of Freddie Gray. This historic moment is the result of the tireless efforts of families who have lost loved ones to police violence -- here in Baltimore, throughout Maryland, and all across America. They persistently have called attention to the double standards of our criminal justice system.
"We know that today's announcement is only a first step in a state that has historically prosecuted less than two percent of police-involved deaths, while prosecuting thousands of African-Americans for petty offenses. Our systems of justice have been far more willing to treat officers as innocent until proven guilty than they are the communities who are being policed -- communities where people are presumed guilty and stopped, searched, and arrested without cause. The ACLU of Maryland will continue to work for the structural reforms needed to end this double standard.
"We hope this marks the beginning of a nationwide awakening to the many injustices and inequalities that we have allowed to continue for far too long."
This statement is available online here: https://www.aclu-md.org/press_room/225
The American Civil Liberties Union was founded in 1920 and is our nation's guardian of liberty. The ACLU works in the courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
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ICE Admits They Didn't Have a Warrant When They Arrested Mahmoud Khalil
"ICE has admitted it detained Mahmoud illegally and without a warrant—to justify it, they are now flat out lying with an absurd claim that he tried to flee," said a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Apr 25, 2025
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents did not have a warrant when they arrested Palestinian activist and green-card holder Mahmoud Khalil on March 8, according to court papers filed by the Department of Homeland Security on Thursday—an admission that elicited outrage from members of Khalil's legal team.
Marc Van Der Hout, an attorney representing Khalil, said Thursday that "DHS agents who arrested Mahmoud lied to him: They wrote in their arrest report that the agents told him that they had an arrest warrant, but DHS has now admitted in their filing that that was a lie and that there was no warrant at all at the time of the arrest."
"The government's admission is astounding," added Van Der Hout.
Officers with DHS served Khalil with a warrant after his arrest when he arrived at an ICE facility in New York for processing, according to court filings. In the filing, an attorney for DHS argued that "an exception to the warrant requirement exists where the immigration officer has reason to believe that the individual is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained."
According to the government, immigration agents did not need a warrant to arrest Khalil because his conduct gave them reason to believe it was likely he would flee. The government also alleged that Khalil "refused to cooperate" with immigration agents arresting him—an account that Khalil's supporters say contradicts a video of his arrest that was taken by his wife, Noor Abdalla.
"ICE has admitted it detained Mahmoud illegally and without a warrant—to justify it, they are now flat out lying with an absurd claim that he tried to flee. At every step of the way, the Trump administration has flouted the law," said Samah Sisay, a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Another attorney for Khalil, Amy Greer, said she was on the phone with Khalil, his wife, and even spoke to the agent making the arrest on March 8.
"In the face of multiple agents in plain clothes who clearly intended to abduct him, and despite the fact that those agents repeatedly failed to show us a warrant, Mahmoud remained calm and complied with their orders," she said Thursday. "Today we now know why they never showed Mahmoud that warrant—they didn't have one."
According to CNN, these latest documents were filed to fulfill a request from the New Jersey federal district court judge overseeing Khalil's federal case, who directed Khalil's legal team and attorneys at the Department of Justice to submit all filings that were presented in his immigration case in Louisiana, where he is currently being held at an ICE detention center.
In federal court, Khalil's attorneys are challenging the legality of his detention and have sought his release on bail.
Khalil, who completed work on his masters degree from Columbia University in December, was active in pro-Palestine organizing on the school's campus last year. Another Palestinian green-card holder active in Columbia's student protest movement, Mohsen Mahdawai, was also recently arrested by federal immigration agents.
Abdalla was eight months pregnant when Khalil was detained. ICE denied Kahlil's request for a temporary furlough to be with his wife while she gave birth on April 21.
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'We Have Been Working Against That': Trump and Johnson Dump Cold Water on Millionaire Tax Hike
"We fully expect Republicans to once again sacrifice everything and everyone at the altar of tax cuts for their ultra-wealthy benefactors at the expense of working people," said one progressive campaigner.
Apr 25, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump indicated in an interview published Friday that he's unlikely to push congressional Republicans to include a tax hike on millionaires in their sprawling reconciliation bill, saying he doesn't "want it to be used against me politically."
Trump's comments to TIME magazine came a day after he told reporters in the Oval Office that raising the statutory income tax rate on people who earn more than $1 million a year would be "very disruptive, because a lot of the millionaires would leave the country." (The notion of millionaire tax flight, often cited by Republicans as a reason not to raise taxes on the rich, has been repeatedly debunked.)
In recent weeks, pro-Trump figures such as former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and a small number of Republicans in Congress have floated the idea of slightly raising income taxes for millionaires, suggesting the move would help counter progressive attacks on Trump and his billionaire-stocked Cabinet as a manifestation of the United States' descent into oligarchy.
"This guts the AOC-Bernie 'oligarchy tour,'" Bannon toldThe Washington Post earlier this week. "Politically, it's game, set, match—it's a no-brainer. This would destroy the Democrats."
But Trump told TIME that he's concerned about political backlash stemming from any tax increase on millionaires, even as he acknowledged it "doesn't make that much of a difference" to the rich.
"I would be honored to pay more," said Trump, whose organization was convicted in 2022 of a long-running tax fraud scheme. "But I don't want to be in a position where we lose an election because I was generous."
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) toldFox News earlier this week that he "would not expect" a millionaire tax hike to wind up in the GOP reconciliation package, which is expected to extend the 2017 Trump-GOP tax breaks and enact an additional $1.5 trillion in tax cuts—paid for in part by slashing Medicaid, federal nutrition assistance, and other programs.
"We have been working against that idea," Johnson added. "I'm not in favor of raising the tax rates because our party is the group that stands against that traditionally."
"The real thing that's going on here is that Republicans are feeling the pressure of our messaging. They're cutting basic service programs like Medicaid and SNAP to give tax cuts to billionaires."
Proposals floated by Republican lawmakers and discussed in Trump's inner circle in recent days include allowing the top marginal tax rate to revert to 39.6%—the level prior to enactment of the 2017 tax cuts—next year and establishing a new top marginal rate of 40%, which would do nothing to tax mega-billionaires like Elon Musk, whose wealth is mostly stock that's only taxed when sold.
The millionaire tax hike proposals have drawn vocal opposition from big business, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—the nation's largest corporate lobbying group—joining a recent letter rejecting any proposed tax increase on millionaires.
David Kass, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, told Common Dreams in an interview Friday that "even if they did put something like this in" the final reconciliation package, "it's really important to remember that the bill would still be overwhelmingly skewed to the rich."
"The real thing that's going on here is that Republicans are feeling the pressure of our messaging," said Kass. "They're cutting basic service programs like Medicaid and SNAP to give tax cuts to billionaires."
Morris Pearl, chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, told Common Dreams in an emailed statement that "while we are supportive of efforts to raise the income tax rate on millionaires, if past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, we'll believe Republicans are serious about protecting working people from an unfair tax burden when we see it."
"As they prepare their bill for an early summer passage," said Pearl, "we fully expect Republicans to once again sacrifice everything and everyone at the altar of tax cuts for their ultra-wealthy benefactors at the expense of working people."
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'Authoritarianism in Action': Trump Orders DOJ Probe of Democratic Donation Platform ActBlue
Rep. Jamie Raskin called Trump's memorandum "the kind of edict you'd expect from a power-mad dictator in a Banana Republic."
Apr 25, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday launched his latest attack on political opponents by directing the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue, a critical fundraising platform for Democrats and progressive organizations.
The order came in the form of a memorandum that the president signed shortly before heading to his Virginia golf course for a $1 million-per-plate fundraiser for MAGA Inc., a pro-Trump super PAC that has been accused of receiving illegal straw-donor contributions.
In his memorandum, Trump raised "concerns" about straw donations—when a donor makes a contribution through another person or entity—and directed U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to "investigate allegations regarding the unlawful use of online fundraising platforms to make 'straw' or 'dummy' contributions or foreign contributions to political candidates and committees, and to take all appropriate actions to enforce the law."
Trump's memorandum cites a recent report from House Republicans accusing ActBlue of "a lack of commitment to stopping fraud." ActBlue and House Democrats rejected the GOP findings at the time, calling the document "less of a report and more of a desperate effort to change the subject."
"This president, with his approval ratings underwater and sinking like a stone, is desperately seeking to undermine his political opposition by cutting off their access to funding."
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said Thursday that Trump's broadside against ActBlue marks a similar attempt to divert attention from the president's own corruption.
"Donald Trump pocketed millions of dollars in unlawful payments from foreign governments during his first term, his administration shut down a probe into whether his campaign received an illegal and urgent $10 million bribe from Egypt, and foreign nationals are spending millions on Trump-owned cryptocurrencies right now in apparent hopes of buying their way out of federal criminal investigations through undisclosed payments," Raskin said in a statement.
"The Trump administration has also systematically dismantled crime-fighting efforts at the Department of Justice aimed at foreign corruption of our politics and actually announced its indifference to violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act," he continued. "So it's rich indeed for Americans to read now that Trump has launched a big initiative to 'crack down on foreign influence' in American politics with one purpose—crippling the fundraising platform of his political opponents."
"Today's presidential decree targeting the campaign infrastructure of the Democratic Party with precisely zero evidence of wrongdoing is the kind of edict you'd expect from a power-mad dictator in a Banana Republic. This president, with his approval ratings underwater and sinking like a stone, is desperately seeking to undermine his political opposition by cutting off their access to funding."
Since its inception in 2004, ActBlue has raised nearly $17 billion through its platform, and it is widely used by Democratic candidates and progressive groups, including organizations critical of the Democratic leadership such as Justice Democrats. (Common Dreams is among the organizations that use ActBlue to process donations.)
According to ActBlue, nearly 15 million Democratic donors have saved their payment information on the platform.
In a statement, ActBlue said that "today's escalation by the White House is blatantly unlawful and needs to be seen for what it is: Donald Trump's latest front in his campaign to stamp out all political, electoral, and ideological opposition."
"ActBlue will immediately pursue all legal avenues to protect and defend itself," the organization added.
Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, called Trump's investigation order "authoritarianism in action." In a joint statement, Martin and the heads of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Democratic Governors Association said that "Trump's memorandum targeting ActBlue is designed to undermine democratic participation—and it's no wonder why."
"He knows Americans are already fed up with his chaotic agenda that is driving the economy off a cliff, so he's trying to block lawful grassroots donations from supporters giving just $5 or $10 to candidates who oppose him while further empowering the corrupt billionaires who already control his administration," the Democratic leaders said. "As Democrats, we're unified in standing with the millions of Americans who are fighting back against Trump's dangerous abuses of power."
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