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The Hill
10-06-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Press groups warn federal agents may have violated journalists' First Amendment rights in LA
A handful of First Amendment advocacy groups are raising concerns about the treatment of journalists covering the ongoing protests in Los Angeles over federal immigration enforcement in the area by police. In a letter dated Tuesday and sent to the Department of Homeland Security, the First Amendment Coalition, Freedom of the Press Foundation and National Press Club wrote 'to express alarm that federal officers may have violated the First Amendment rights of journalists covering recent protests and unrest related to immigration enforcement in the Los Angeles area.' 'A number of reports suggest that federal officers have indiscriminately used force or deployedmunitions such as tear gas or pepper balls that caused significant injuries to journalists,' the groups wrote in their letter. 'In some cases, federal officers appear to have deliberately targeted journalists who were doing nothing more than their job covering the news.' Many of the demonstrations in Los Angeles have turned violent, with protestors setting cars on fire and getting into tense confrontations with police. President Trump has called in National Guard troops to quell the violence and clashed with the state's governor over the crisis. 'To the extent that officers may lawfully use force against certain individuals who commit illegal acts, the force must be limited to responding to the conduct of those individuals, not used indiscriminately,' the groups wrote to DHS. 'To avoid any further First Amendment violations, please immediately ensure that any federal officers or personnel, or anyone acting under their direction and control, refrain from any unlawful, indiscriminate, and excessive use of force against members of the press and public who are merely covering events of public concern in the Los Angeles area.' The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
USA Today
10-06-2025
- Politics
- USA Today
Press groups push DHS over potential First Amendment violations during LA protests
Press groups push DHS over potential First Amendment violations during LA protests A group of more than two dozen First Amendment and press freedom advocacy groups sent a June 9 letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem over potential First Amendment violations during the protests. Show Caption Hide Caption Australian journalist shot with a rubber bullet in Los Angeles Australian journalist from 9News, Lauren Tomasi, was shot with a rubber bullet while reporting from the protests in Los Angeles. The California-based First Amendment Coalition, the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Los Angeles Press Club led the letter to DHS. In addition, 27 other press freedom and First Amendment advocacy groups signed the June 9 letter. A host of press freedom and civil rights organizations are warning the Department of Homeland Security that federal officers 'may have violated the First Amendment rights' of journalists covering protests over immigration raids in Los Angeles. In a June 9 letter to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, more than two dozen organizations expressed alarm over how the events have unfolded. "The press plays an essential role in our democracy as the public's eyes and ears," wrote the groups, led by the First Amendment Coalition, Freedom of the Press Foundation and Los Angeles Press Club. "The timely reporting of breaking news is necessary to provide the public with complete information, especially about controversial events." Others signing the letter include the American Civil Liberties Union, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Reporters Without Borders and several unions representing journalists. "A number of reports suggest that federal officers have indiscriminately used force or deployed munitions such as tear gas or pepper balls that caused significant injuries to journalists,' the letter said. 'In some cases, federal officers appear to have deliberately targeted journalists who were doing nothing more than their job covering the news.' LA protests live updates: Over 100 people arrested, mayor says; Newsom, Trump clash The Los Angeles Press Club has documented at least 30 cases of journalists being injured while covering the protests. Several of those incidents were caught on camera. New York Post photographer Toby Canham was shot in the head with a rubber bullet, Australian journalist Lauren Tomasi was hit in the leg and Los Angeles Police Department officers detained CNN correspondent Jason Carroll. The LAPD and the California Highway Patrol have not responded to USA TODAY's request for comment on the injuries. The letter said federal officers are required to uphold the freedom of the press under the First Amendment and referenced court cases that affirmed individuals' right to record law enforcement officers executing their duties in public places and journalists' exemption from general dispersal orders so long as they are not interfering with law enforcement actions. Related: Multiple journalists injured by police nonlethal rounds while covering LA protests It said law enforcement's response to criminal conduct must therefore be 'narrowly tailored to addressing the specific conduct of those individuals.' 'To avoid any further First Amendment violations, please immediately ensure that any federal officers or personnel, or anyone acting under their direction and control, refrain from any unlawful, indiscriminate and excessive use of force against members of the press and public who are merely covering events of public concern in the Los Angeles area,' the groups wrote. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin confirmed to USA TODAY that the department received the letter. 'This is a whole-of-government approach to restore law and order,' McLaughlin said of the collaboration among DHS, the Defense Department and others in the Trump administration to respond to the protests. 'We are grateful to our military members and law enforcement who have acted with patriotism in the face of assault, taunts and violence.' Protests over immigration raids in the city started on June 6 and grew over the following days. President Donald Trump, against California Gov. Gavin Newsom's wishes, ordered 2,000 National Guard troops to the city on June 7. Newsom called the move 'purposefully inflammatory,' and the state sued the administration on June 9. Newsom referred to Trump's deployment of hundreds of Marines that same day as a 'blatant abuse of power' and said further legal action would follow. Contributing: Jeanine Santucci BrieAnna Frank is a First Amendment Reporting Fellow at USA TODAY. Reach her at bjfrank@ USA TODAY's coverage of First Amendment issues is funded through a collaboration between the Freedom Forum and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editorial input.
Time Magazine
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Time Magazine
As White House Purges Public Records, These Independent Databases Are Keeping Their Own Trump Archives
President Donald Trump has promised Americans 'radical transparency'—but his government has taken a number of steps that observers say make it anything but the self-described ' most transparent Administration in history! ' In his first term, which the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation described as ' allergic to transparency,' the White House stopped releasing visitor logs, censored or rejected a record percentage of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and refused to release his tax returns. So far, the second-term Trump Administration has scrubbed federal websites, limited reporters' access, and used disappearing-message apps for high-level communications that typically should be retained for posterity. The Associated Press reported last week that ' Trump could leave less documentation behind than any previous U.S. President,' and the Freedom of the Press Foundation said the Trump Administration ' is eroding the information environment in ways this country has never seen.' Most recently, this week the White House removed official transcripts of the President's remarks, which are now only available as videos—a departure from a common practice across Democratic and Republican administrations over decades. The only transcript that is now available on the White House website is Trump's inaugural address. 'You must be truly f-cking stupid if you think we're not transparent,' White House communications director Steven Cheung told HuffPost when asked about the latest move. In the void of official archives, a number of independent record-keepers have taken matters into their own hands, offering the public a cache of data and documentation to sift and search through without fear of sudden removal. Still, these mostly collect only previously-made public records, and transparency advocates remain concerned about those that the public may never see. Here are some of the databases available. American Presidency Project What started out in 1999 as a project by then-graduate student Gerhard Peters and professor John Woolley at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for students of political science has since turned into a valuable comprehensive digital repository of presidential public documents dating back to George Washington. The nonprofit, nonpartisan American Presidency Project hosts copies of Trump's speeches and executive orders, social media posts, press pool reports, media interviews, and more—from both his terms as well as his campaigns and transition periods. Archive Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab, which developed the web-archiving tool, released in February a new archive of more than 300,000 data sets from the U.S. government's repository of open data. 'We've built this project on our long-standing commitment to preserving government records and making public information available to everyone,' the lab said in announcing the project. Data Rescue Project The Data Rescue Project is a collaboration between organizations like IASSIST, RDAP, and members of the Data Curation Network. The project, which started out in February on a Google Doc, aims to 'serve as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points' for public U.S. governmental data that it deems 'currently at risk.' Data it harvests, including from government agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Education, is maintained in the searchable archive DataLumos, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research's crowd-sourced repository hosted by the University of Michigan. Started in 2017 by Virginia husband and wife Bill Frischling and Jennifer Canty to empower the public to factcheck Trump's statements for themselves, collects videos of Trump's speeches, as well as press gaggles and other appearances. 'How could you argue something is not true if you could see not only what this person said but the entire context around it?' Frischling told BuzzFeed News. The database was acquired by FiscalNote and is now hosted by FiscalNote's policy news site Roll Call. It also has a collection of Trump's tweets and social media posts, going as far back as 2009, as well as the President's public schedule and emailed press releases from the White House. Federal Environmental Web Tracker by EDGI Formed in 2016 to document changes to 'vulnerable' federal environmental data, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) is a research collaboration of professionals advocating for environmental awareness. Its website-monitoring team created a tracker for changes to environment-related federal pages. Since returning to office, the Trump Administration has purged information or text related to the climate crisis on many government websites. Internet Archive The Internet Archive is a nonprofit that provides users free access to its expansive digital library. Since beginning in 1996, the archive has a collection of more than 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, 15 million audio recordings, 10.6 million videos, 4.8 million images, and a million software programs. 'Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge,' it says on its site. In 2017, it launched the Trump Archive, which collects 'TV news shows containing debates, speeches, interviews, rallies, and other reporting related to Donald Trump, before his first presidency and throughout subsequent years.' But anybody can contribute. Described by the New Yorker as 'a tech-support professional' in Kansas, a man identified only as Andrew—who uses the moniker Grumpy—began downloading videos from federal agencies on February 1 in response to takedowns by the Trump Administration. The videos are available on his Internet Archive account, Grumpy System. The Internet Archive also operates the Wayback Machine, a tool that preserves timestamped snapshots of websites. Like the Internet Archive's other databases, individuals can contribute to the Wayback Machine, too. Its director told NPR that six weeks into Trump's second term, some 73,000 government web pages (and counting) were cataloged before being expunged, including reportedly the only copy of the House Jan. 6 Committee's interactive timeline of the 2021 Capitol Riot. The Wayback Machine has also hosted since 2008 the End of Term Web Archive, which 'collects, preserves, and makes accessible United States Government websites at the end of presidential administrations.' Rev AI-powered speech-to-text company Rev hosts a free Transcript Library that includes searchable transcripts of Trump's public appearances going back years. Trump's Truth Trump's Truth, a project by the Never-Trump-Republican founded nonprofit group Defending Democracy Together, archives all of Trump's posts on his platform TRUTH Social. While Trump's TRUTH Social posts are publicly available, the Trump's Truth site warns that the President's posts on his own platform 'may be deleted at any time.' The archive checks for new posts 'every few minutes' and includes video transcription and image descriptions to enable greater search ability. 'We believe this is an essential part of the historical record, and that it must be preserved for its educational, journalistic and research value,' the site says.
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
US intelligence finds Venezuela not directing gang, undercutting Trump's use of Alien Enemies Act
The US intelligence community believes that the Venezuelan government is 'probably' not directing the gang Tren de Aragua's movements and operations inside the United States, according to a declassified assessment released on Monday that undercuts the Trump administration's key argument for invoking the Alien Enemies Act to speed up deportations. According to the document, which was released to the Freedom of the Press Foundation under the Freedom of Information Act and provided to CNN, the intelligence community based its judgment largely on sometimes-lethal law enforcement action by the Venezuelan government against Tren de Aragua that shows it 'treats TDA as a threat' as well as the fact that the group is so decentralized that any systemic relationship between the Maduro regime and the gang would be 'logistically challenging' — and would likely be spotted by the US intelligence community. The assessment, which was circulated in the US government in early April, has become a flashpoint in President Donald Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which gives a president broad power to target and remove undocumented immigrants in times of war or when an enemy attempts an 'invasion or predatory incursion.' Trump in March invoked the wartime law in part by declaring that 'TdA is undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.' A Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas on Friday ruled that the president had unlawfully invoked the law, finding that the president 'cannot summarily declare that a foreign nation or government has threatened or perpetrated an invasion or predatory incursion of the United States,' and blocking the administration from quickly deporting some alleged members of the Venezuelan gang. The intelligence assessment acknowledged that the Maduro regime likely 'sometimes tolerates' Tren de Aragua's presence within its borders, with some individual government officials cooperating with the group for financial gain. And FBI analysts assessed that some number of Venezuelan government officials 'facilitate' TdA members' migration to the United States and use 'members as proxies' there and in other countries 'to advance what they see as the Maduro regime's goal of destabilizing governments and undermining public safety in those countries,' the assessment said. But the broader intelligence community views it as 'highly unlikely' that there is any 'strategic or consistent' cooperation between the Maduro government and Tren de Aragua. Intelligence analysts also expressed skepticism about some of the law enforcement reporting that some members of the regime may have provided financial support to TdA, because it cannot verify the sources' access — and because some of the claims have come from people detained in the United States, which 'could motivate them to make false allegations about their ties to the regime … to lessen any punishment by providing exculpatory of otherwise 'valuable' information to US prosecutors,' the report read. In any event, the intelligence community has 'not observed the regime directing the TDA, including to push migrants to the United States, which would probably requirement extensive … coordination, and funding between regime entities and TDA leaders that we would collect,' the assessment read. Further, the assessment read, 'the small size of TDA's cells, its focus on low-skill criminal activities, and its decentralized structure make it highly unlikely that TDA coordinates large volumes of human trafficking or migrant smuggling.' The New York Times first reported on the declassified assessment. When reporting about the intelligence community's view of the Maduro regime's relationship to Tren de Aragua first appeared after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, the administration cast the reporting as both 'inaccurate' and 'classified,' with the Justice Department announcing a leak investigation. The assessment released on Monday appears to broadly confirm the press reporting of the intelligence community's views. 'Illegal immigrant criminals have raped, tortured, and murdered Americans, and still, the propaganda media continues to operate as apologists for them,' Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in a statement on Monday, when asked about the April assessment. 'It is outrageous that as President Trump and his administration work hard every day to make America safe by deporting these violent criminals, some in the media remain intent on twisting and manipulating intelligence assessments to undermine the President's agenda to keep the American people safe.' For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at
The Intercept
09-04-2025
- Politics
- The Intercept
Press Coalition Challenges Trump's Executive Order Threatening Press Freedom and Legal Representation
The Trump administration's strong-arming of lawyers is likely to have significant consequences for those he calls 'the enemy of the people': the press. That is why 61 media organizations and press freedom advocates, led by The Intercept's Press Freedom Defense Fund and Freedom of the Press Foundation, filed an amicus brief today urging the court to strike down an executive order that imposed sanctions on the Perkins Coie law firm for representing President Donald Trump's political opponents and enforcing the Voting Rights Act. The amicus brief, authored by Albert Sellars LLP, argues that the press plays an essential role as both a proxy for the public and a check on government power, which requires an oppositional relationship with government interests. The president's executive orders targeting lawyers with clients opposed to his agenda would severely restrict press organizations' access to legal counsel, particularly for outlets relying on pro bono or reduced-fee representation. 'An independent media requires First Amendment champions to guarantee citizens access to the information necessary to hold our government accountable,' said The Intercept's Chief Legal Officer David Bralow. 'This is why The Intercept's Press Freedom Defense Fund and Freedom of the Press Foundation, along with partner organizations nationwide, filed an amicus brief to prevent the administration's unconstitutional efforts to intimidate lawyers fulfilling their professional oaths.' 'Newsrooms are broke and FOIA is broken. Journalists face the threat of SLAPP suits, subpoenas, arrest, and, these days, even deportation, just for doing their jobs,' said Seth Stern, Freedom of the Press Foundation's advocacy director. 'Now more than ever, reporters need access to quality pro bono representation to overcome these obstacles and hold the government accountable. If an anti-free speech president can shake down law firms that represent clients he doesn't like, press freedom will suffer immeasurably, and the American public will be less informed.' The coalition includes news organizations, press associations, advocacy groups, media law firms, and individual attorneys with over five centuries of collective experience in First Amendment and press freedom issues. 'The signatories of this brief champion the public's right to information — democracy's cornerstone. The Intercept and Press Freedom Defense Fund defend this principle both through our investigative reporting and our vital work safeguarding independent journalism,' said Annie Chabel, The Intercept's CEO. For more information, please contact the press team at The Intercept.
