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NY State Appeals Court Denies 'Ridiculous' Effort to Halt Trump Sentencing
"Immunity doesn't apply to the unofficial conduct for which he was convicted in NY," wrote one legal expert.
Jan 07, 2025
On Tuesday, an appeals court in New York denied President-elect Donald Trump's bid to delay his January 10 sentencing in his criminal "hush money" case.
Appearing before Judge Ellen Gesmer, Trump's legal team argued that a sitting president's immunity from prosecution extends to a president-elect.
In July, the Supreme Court ruled that former presidents have immunity—in some cases "presumptive" and in others "absolute"—for their "officials acts" taken while in office.
Gesmer allowed sentencing to proceed after a brief hearing during which she appeared skeptical of the argument presented by Trump's lawyer, according to The New York Times. The outlet wrote that the ruling is "a significant setback to Trump's hopes of shutting down the case before returning to the White House."
"Trump will run through the appeals courts looking for one willing to pause his impending sentencing. But his argument is just ridiculous—immunity doesn't apply to the unofficial conduct for which he was convicted in NY," wrote Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a think tank, on X Tuesday.
Last week, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan upheld the president-elect's criminal conviction of 34 counts of falsifying business documents. The case pertains to a $130,000 hush-money payment made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels just before Trump's 2016 electoral victory.
Trump's lawyers then filed a request to delay the sentencing with Merchan, which he rejected Monday.
When it comes to sentencing, Merchan has signaled he may issue an unconditional discharge, meaning Trump would not serve jail time, but it would cement his status as the first U.S. president convicted of a felony.
Trump has other legal avenues to try to delay the sentencing scheduled for Friday, according to the Times.
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Why Society Cannot Sweep Its Way Out of Homelessness
Officials justify sweeps for safety and sanitation reasons, but in the end they harm and displace people who have nowhere else to go. It's the opposite of a solution, especially when we know what's needed and what works.
Dec 21, 2024
This summer, the Supreme Court’s Grants Passruling made it much easier for local governments to criminalize homelessness. Since then, cities and states across the country have stepped up their harassment of people for the “crime” of not having a place to live.
Penalizing homelessness has increasingly taken the form of crackdowns on encampments — also known as “sweeps,” which have received bipartisan support. California Governor Gavin Newsom has ordered state agencies to ramp up encampment sweeps, while President-elect Donald Trump has also pledged to ban encampments and move people to “tent cities” far from public view.
Evidence shows that these sweeps are harmful and unproductive — and not to mention dehumanizing.
Housing justice advocates caution that sweeps disrupt peoples’ lives by severing their ties to case workers, medical care, and other vital services. Many unhoused people also have their personal documents and other critical belongings seized or tossed, which makes it even harder to find housing and work.
Sweeps, like punitive fines and arrests, don’t address the root of the problem — they just trap people in cycles of poverty and homelessness.
According to a ProPublica investigation, authorities in multiple cities have confiscated basic survival items like tents and blankets, as well as medical supplies like CPAP machines and insulin. Other people lost items like phones and tools that impacted their ability to work.
Teresa Stratton from Portland toldProPublica that her husband’s ashes were even taken in a sweep. “I wonder where he is,” she said. “I hope he’s not in the dump.”
Over the summer, the city of Sacramento, California forcefully evicted 48 residents — mostly women over 55 with disabilities — from a self-governed encampment known as Camp Resolution. The camp was located at a vacant lot and had been authorized by the city, which also owned the trailers where residents lived.
One of the residents who’d been at the hospital during the sweep was assured that her belongings would be kept safe. However, she told me she lost everything she’d worked so hard to acquire, including her car.
The loss of her home and community of two years, along with her possessions, was already traumatizing. But now, like most of the camp residents, she was forced back onto the streets — even though the city had promised not to sweep the lot until every resident had been placed in permanent housing.
Aside from being inhumane, the seizure of personal belongings raises serious constitutional questions — especially since sweeps often take place with little to no warning and authorities often fail to properly store belongings. Six unhoused New Yorkers recently sued the city on Fourth Amendment grounds, citing these practices.
Sweeps, like punitive fines and arrests, don’t address the root of the problem — they just trap people in cycles of poverty and homelessness. Encampments can pose challenges to local communities, but their prevalence stems from our nation’s failure to ensure the fundamental human right to housing.
People experiencing homelessness are often derided as an “eyesore” and blamed for their plight. However, government policies have allowed housing, a basic necessity for survival, to become commodified and controlled by corporations and billionaire investors for profit.
Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage has remained stagnant at $7.25 since 2009 and rent is now unaffordable for half of all tenants. Alongside eroding social safety nets, these policies have resulted in a housing affordability crisis that’s left at least 653,000 people without housing nationwide.
While shelters can help some people move indoors temporarily, they aren’t a real housing solution, either.
Human rights groups report that shelters often don’t meet adequate standards of housing or accommodate people with disabilities. Many treat people like they’re incarcerated by imposing curfews and other restrictions, such as not allowing pets. Safety and privacy at shelters are also growing concerns.
Officials justify sweeps for safety and sanitation reasons, but in the end they harm and displace people who have nowhere else to go. Instead, governments should prioritize safe, affordable, dignified, and permanent housing for all, coupled with supportive services.
Anything else is sweeping the problem under the rug.
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We Will All Be Casualties in Trump’s War on Birthright Citizenship
What Donald Trump’s effort to dismantle the 14th amendment’s guarantee of citizenship for people born in the U.S. might look like and what it would mean for all of us.
Dec 20, 2024
On December 8, President-elect Donald Trump sat down for an interview on “Meet the Press” with Kristen Welker. The interview covered a wide range of topics, but one that drew a lot of attention was his response to a question (more of a statement) that Welker posed. She reminded him, “You promised to end birthright citizenship on day one,” to which he responded, “Correct.”
When Welker asked him about how he would “get around the 14th amendment,” Trump gave a rambling, incoherent answer about using an executive order, mixed with an easily disprovable lie that the U.S. is the only country to offer birthright citizenship, when in fact many countries do. It is important to emphasize that all U.S. presidents take an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, and when Trump says he will issue an executive order abrogating the 14th amendment, this is a clear violation of his oath and an impeachable offense.
It is easy to see how a mass detention of people who should be citizens could be used in bad faith by the Trump administration to institute fascism in America.
I previously wrote about why we need to defend birthright citizenship against right-wing attacks. That article goes into depth about the 14th amendment, the fringe and absurd conservative theory saying it doesn’t apply to children of undocumented parents, the horrible dystopia that would be created by a Trump administration that attempted to deny citizenship to people, and the positive benefits of birthright citizenship.
Here, I am going to attempt to flesh out what Donald Trump’s effort to dismantle the 14th amendment’s guarantee of citizenship for people born in the U.S. might look like and what it would mean for all of us. It is important to remember that Trump rarely speaks in terms of policy specifics. Instead, he carelessly tosses out grandiose, vague ideas and leaves it up to his underlings like Stephen Miller and Tom Homan to make actual policy out of them. Although Trump bluffs and lies frequently, he was very active on immigration in his last term, and there is no reason to think this second term will be any different.
Denial of U.S. Passports and Immigrant Petitions to Draw a Legal Challenge
I believe the most likely way that President-elect Trump would start his war on the 14th amendment would be to direct the U.S. Department of State to require that anyone applying for a U.S. passport provide proof that their parents had legal status when they were born. Inevitably, some people will not be able to meet this requirement, and their passport applications will be denied. This will draw legal challenges that will eventually make their way to the Supreme Court.
Another potential attack that Trump could make would be to direct U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to demand proof of parental status for any U.S. citizen who tries to petition for permanent resident status for their relative. If you are a U.S. citizen, you can petition for your spouse, child, or parent to obtain permanent resident status (a green card) by filing form I-130 with USCIS. Currently, the citizen petitioner only needs to show they were born in the U.S. to prove citizenship. Trump could add a requirement that they prove their parents were in lawful status when they were born. If they are unable to, then they will not be able to petition for their relatives to stay with them in the U.S.
The Supreme Court is stacked with right-wing, activist justices who have shown time and time again that they are perfectly willing to ignore the plain text of the law (in this case, the 14th amendment) if it suits their policy goals. There is a non-insignificant chance that they will ignore the text of the 14th amendment and upend over 100 years of settled law to rule by fiat that children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents are not granted citizenship at birth.
Of course, this is the goal of Miller, Homan, and the other anti-immigrant MAGA acolytes. They know that they are never going to get enough popular support for a constitutional amendment that would strip citizenship from children of undocumented parents. Their best hope is to draw a legal challenge and take their case to a MAGA-friendly Supreme Court in the hope that they will invalidate birthright citizenship through a court decision.
The Nightmare Scenario: Weaponizing ICE to Detain U.S. Citizens
The nightmare, dystopian scenario, which I touched on in my previous piece, would be for Donald Trump to direct U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to begin detaining people who were born in the U.S., but who cannot prove that their parents had lawful status when they were born. Think about how onerous of a requirement it would be to have to prove that your parents had lawful status when you were born. Most people from previous generations didn’t have any affirmative proof of citizenship, unless they naturalized. If your parents were born in the U.S., how can they prove their parents were in lawful status? What about their parents? Would you have to prove a chain of unbroken status dating back to the inception of the 14th amendment? It creates a potentially impossible standard in order to prove U.S. citizenship for anyone born in the U.S., let alone children with undocumented parents.
Let’s imagine the implications of a bad-faith Republican President like Trump aggressively challenging the citizenship of people born in the U.S. If someone is retroactively deemed to be a noncitizen, then they have likely been unlawfully present in the U.S. their entire life. Whenever they worked or voted in any U.S. election, they were doing so unlawfully. This would give ICE a way to detain virtually anyone that Donald Trump wanted to go after. Since this would apply to so many people, it could easily be used selectively against Trump’s enemies. It is worth highlighting that people in immigration detention suffer horrible conditions. People in immigration proceedings have no right to an attorney, and the government has substantial power to hold people in immigration detention without bond.
It is easy to see how a mass detention of people who should be citizens could be used in bad faith by the Trump administration to institute fascism in America. Any citizen who commits any kind of minor crime, or even requests a government benefit like food stamps, could suddenly face deportation if they can’t prove their parents had lawful status when they were born. There really is no bottom to how awful things could be if we lose the protection of birthright citizenship.
Although we cannot predict exactly how the new administration will go after the 14th amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, it is important that we stand against it at every turn, because if we lose birthright citizenship, the country we are left with won’t be one that we recognize.
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