From Roger Fitch and our friends down under...

 The Poisoning Of America

ROGER FITCH ESQ    TUESDAY, MAY 19, 2026

Trump's corruption runs wild ... The grotesque IRS "settlement" ... Scrubbing the presidential records ... DOJ's culpability ... What happens post-Trump? ... The ICE Gestapo ... Abuse on an unprecedented scale ... Some judges are standing up ... Roger Fitch's letter from Washington

 

“He is a dangerous and corrupt gangster, and that is how we must treat him … will the prime minister advise the king to call off his state visit to Washington before it’s too late? Because I really fear for what Trump might say or do while our king is forced to stand by his side. We cannot put His Majesty in that position”  –  Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, urging the UK PM to cancel the King’s US visit. 

 

 

The King and the British know what he is. Trump has always been vain, ignorant, vengeful, dishonest, corrupt and three-quarters-crazy; he’s now a convicted fraudster, immunised from prosecution and determined to steal as much as he can in his remaining years.

 

That means shakedowns for assets, benefits and payoffs, bribes extracted for favours, e.g, pardons on a scale approaching that of the feisty Texas governor “Ma” Ferguson a century ago.

 

Mafia tactics are employed by the government’s goons and lawyers, in service to crooked businessmen, predatory billionaires, Big Tech/Crypto opportunists, right-wing and religious zealots, social outcasts and arrivistes, white racists, misogynists, the whole disaffected, atavistic lot.

 

Before Trump, they were mostly despised minorities; glued together by Trump, they made a plurality in the last election.

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The Justice Department is now staffed with unscrupulous men and women, nominally “lawyers”, yet free of ethics or respect for law. They run Trump’s appalling grift shop, and seek to defend his civil suits.

 

Trump’s “litigation extortion machine” grinds on: he sued the IRS for $10 billion for civilian damages to himself, a suit with no legal basis that IRS and DOJ purport to “settle” with Trump in a $1.776 billion sweetheart deal benefitting rioters.

 

The US judge ordered briefing and a hearing in this absurd, overtly corrupt case, but Trump dropped the case, announcing a “settlement” not recognised by the court.

 

The chief of the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel recently opined (wrongly) that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional; this is useful for Trump, previously apprehended by Special Counsel Jack Smith while attempting to loot the National Archives.

 

Trump wants no Nixon Tapes, no damning evidence likely to be subpoenaed.

 

Trump is determined that no prior instance of justice under Democrats or even Republicans (e.g, state voting requirements, the twice-renewed VRA) be allowed to stand. Similarly, no crime or injustice will be punished or rectified.

 

Thousands of lawyers have left the Justice Department, now party-corrupted, with lawyers so bad, DOJ seeks regulations to insulate them from state bar investigations that might result in some (including now-sacked AG Bondi) being struck off.

 

DOJ is also suing to prevent disbarment of disreputable lawyers like the Republican hacks Jeffrey Clark and Ed Martin.

 

After MAGA, the post-imperial government will have as one of its first tasks rebuilding the once-admired US justice system. There’s a model in the post-war reconstruction of the Nazi Legal System and the Allied Control Council’s Order No 4, Reorganisation of the German Judicial System.

 

As in Denazification, reversal of Trump-Law must build on the constitutional system that existed before the lawless dictatorship was established.

 

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ICE and Immigration

 

“These are marauding, fascist thugs who enjoy terrorising people. They’re in their dream job. They raid churches. They abduct people. They abduct children. They use children to abduct other people. They shot a woman in the face. They tear-gassed a car of children…They detained a 5-year-old, used him to bait his parents, and then took them all away“ – New Republic

 

Flouting of the law by the US immigration agencies ICE and CBP has grown steadily since 2005, and DOJ has been forced to admit in court that ICE policies are illegal. Tear-gas, gratuitous violence and (expedited by immigration courts) lawless deportations continue.

 

Some fear Trump is creating a personal Gestapo, as the government builds regional Konzentrationslager.

 

The camps (mostly in the old Confederacy) have appalling conditions, such as one in El Paso in far West Texas, the site of a WWII Japanese internment camp.

 

The ACLU reported on the cruel treatment of immigration detainees at Fort Bliss, and Amnesty revealed the systemic ICE brutality and actual torture at Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” and state-run immigration prison “Krome”.

 

Trump’s administration is heartlessly withdrawing medical care for ICE detainees, and at the same time, hiding hospital admissions from lawyers and families, violating law and ICE guidelines. People are dying.

 

There’s special malice towards immigrant children and families. The parents of at least 12,000 American children have been arrested and threatened with deportation, some entrapped at their children’s US Marine graduations.

 

ICE hides detainees from their lawyers and detains immigrants who attend Immigration

appointments for green cards or even citizenship interviews. Every arrest/detention risks ICE agents confiscating and not returning working papers and personal identification, leaving immigrants unable to defend a deportation proceeding or respond to the next request for Ihre Papiere.

 

ICE also has a vicious practice of seizing those arrested, denying bail and moving them across the country, far from family, friends and lawyers, and the courts where they might seek habeas, to face immigration courts in states (Texas, Louisiana) within the far-right Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

 

Paradoxically (as births attract citizenship), ICE moves pregnant girls (some raped) to Texas to avoid providing them legal abortions.

 

Southern prisons are punishment in themselves, an inducement to self-deportation, but to where? ICE attempts to send deportees, whose deportation may not yet have received due process finality, to inappropriate, dangerous or punitive (e.g, El Salvador) places. The severely disabled are not spared.

 

Prior due process is often lacking. In Texas and Louisiana, detainees face Article II immigration judges appointed (and partisanly

purged) by the government. Detainees risk prosecution by military lawyers conscripted to try civilian immigration cases.

 

The government even claims immigration agents can presume guilt.

 

The Trump-besieged immigration judges who ruled in favour of pro-Palestinian activists Rumaysa Özturk and Mohsen Mahdawi were summarily replaced, and thereafter the students lost in the Trump-infested Board of Immigration Appeals.  Both are still awaiting habeas determinations by real, Article III judges.

 

If defendants like Özturk, Mahdawi, and the long-suffering Mahmoud Khalil succeed in appearing before a federal judge, summary deportations are often enjoined: lower federal court judges have the measure of the Trump regime and are biting back.

 

According to Politico, in 90% of cases (over 10,000 proceedings), more than 425 federal judges have ruled that ICE is holding people illegally while they await deportation.

 

In order to get continued Homeland Security funding through Congress, Trump’s ICE underlings have offered to stop detaining/deporting American citizens, and stop warrantless searches and seizures that violate the 4th Amendment.

 

It’s come to that: offers to stop some illegal acts in return for funding others.