The Friday Brief, January 9, 2025
Inside:
Truth and Reconciliation
Iran on the Brink
Venezuela
ICE Assassinations
Seizing Greenland Is Stupid
Lights Out In the Shining City
Trump’s Fantasy Economy
The Passion of the Doomed and Departing
What I’m Reading
Scenes From the Home Front (Wedding pics and Christmas cat!)
The Big Picture
This is a fictional newspaper article set in an alternate United States in 2035.
“The Republic v. Miller et al”: First Trump-Era Tribunal Opens as Truth Commission Turns to the Architects of the Crackdown
WASHINGTON — June 18, 2035
The courtroom is built like a confession.
It sits inside the restored east wing of the old Federal District Courthouse, marble cleaned, brass polished, bullet pock divots left in place on purpose. Above the judges’ bench hangs a simple seal adopted after the war: E PLURIBUS LEX, “Out of many, law.”
At 9:02 a.m., the five defendants rose together, an oddly synchronized motion that looked more like muscle memory than respect. They faced three judges: one retired federal appellate jurist, one military judge from the reconstituted Judge Advocate General's Corps, and one civil rights scholar appointed by the Senate under the 2032 Justice Renewal Act.
In the first row of the gallery sat families who had spent a decade learning new kinds of waiting: for fathers who never came home from “temporary processing,” waiting daughters whose names were misspelled in detention logs, waiting for the country to remember itself. A few wore laminated photographs carried through the black years: faces held up at vigils while cameras looked away.
Then the clerk read the caption that will likely define an era in history books:
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. STEPHEN MILLER, KRISTI NOEM, TOM HOMAN, GREG BOVINO, and OTHERS.
The charges, filed under a postwar synthesis of federal criminal law, military law, and ratified human-rights obligations for government officals are stark: crimes against humanity, torture and cruel treatment, unlawful confinement, forced displacement, conspiracy to deprive constitutional rights under color of law, murder, kidnapping, and illegal domestic deployment of military force.
The story the government intends to tell is equally stark: that the Trump-era crackdown did not simply “happen.” It was first designed as policy, then as a political weapon, and finally as machinery. The government sought to prove that these defendants were not mere functionaries. They were authors of vast criminality under the color of law.
In a nation recovering from decades of performance politics, the tribunal has been engineered to resist theatricality. There will be no pundit panels, no “trial scorecards,” no crowd shots. Cameras are limited to a fixed feed, the same angle every day. The public can watch, but not consume.
“Justice has to be boring again,” Chief Judge Elena Marquez said. “If it is entertaining, we have failed.”
Outside, security was visible but restrained: National Guard in soft caps, no armored vehicles, no long guns. A permitted protest stood behind barricades, holding signs that read DUE PROCESS IS THE POINT, a sentence people only write after learning what it costs when due process disappears.
In question are the deaths at the hands of ICE and DHS of over 180 American citizens and over 1,100 immigrants, as well as the illegal use of force against over 3,500 American citizens and tens of thousands of immigrants, and the illegal detention of thousands of American citizens.
Stephen Miller, 49, once a White House deputy Chief of Staff and policy architect, is accused of designing the legal and rhetorical framework for what prosecutors call the “Permanent Emergency”: the series of rolling declarations that treated dissent as sabotage and migration as invasion, and that increasingly erased the line between foreign threat and domestic political opposition.
Kristi Noem, 63, former Secretary of Homeland Security in the administration’s final years, is accused of overseeing an expansion of detention operations and authorizing the illegal abuse of DHS intelligence components and political staff to identify journalists, protest organizers, and elected officials as “enemy combatants” and for the corrupt abuse of government planes, housing, and for spending over $400 million dollars on ads featuring herself.
Tom Homan, 73, the administration’s most visible immigration enforcer, is charged with directing ICE operations that prosecutors allege escalated from civil deportation into punitive confinement, “retribution sweeps,” and mass transfers designed to sever detainees from counsel and family. Homan is also accused of running a massive fraud scheme that demanded bribes from DHS contractors.
Greg Bovino, 58, a border enforcement commander whose name became synonymous with the hardline “line-hold” doctrine, is accused of implementing field policies that prosecutors say amounted to systematic abuse, creating “expedited removal systems” where medical care, legal contact, and even recordkeeping were intentionally degraded.
“And others” is not decorative. A sealed list of additional defendants, spanning DHS legal offices, contractor executives, and military liaisons, will be unsealed in phases, according to the Office of the Special Prosecutor. Executives from social media, telecommunications, and data brokers will be called to testify on their sharing of user data with DHS and its prime data contractor, Palantir.
