Legal expert rips Trump admin's new 'especially egregious' arrest

As the Trump administration ramped up its Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation in Los Angeles, one of the people arrested in the chaos was David Huerta, the president of California's division of the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU. But the case against him, filed on Sunday, is so hollow it is clear the Justice Department didn't investigate the claims they're making before moving to charge him, legal expert Marcy Wheeler explained on Bluesky.

This follows other controversial efforts by the Justice Department to criminally charge public officials, including a judge in Wisconsin they claim facilitated the attempted escape of an immigrant wanted by ICE, as well as Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, accused of trespassing in a private ICE detention facility, and Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) from the same protest, shortly after they dropped the charges against Baraka.

Wheeler, better known by her online pseudonym "emptywheel," suggested the conspiracy charges against Huerta might be the most baseless yet.

"Another prominent Democrat [Attorney General] Pam Bondi arrested w/o presenting to a GJ," wrote Wheeler. "Especially egregious here given that complaint just guesses what David Huerta is communicating on his phone. This is literally, 'he was texting on his phone so entered into a conspiracy.'"

The charges, Wheeler noted, are based partly on the identification of a masked Homeland Security Investigations operative. "But he's a computer guy. A computer guy who didn't bother to check phone records before indicting on a conspiracy."

"The Magistrate Judge in the Ras Baraka case ALREADY scolded Pam Bondi's DOJ for charging people w/o investigating first. This is even a worse case of that than Baraka was," she concluded.

Other commenters have similarly panned the criminal complaint against Huerta, with one noting the document is riddled with Spanish misspellings.

The protests in Los Angeles, which escalated as ICE agents raided workplaces in search of unauthorized migrants, have been met with an extreme threat of force, as Trump moves to federalize the National Guard, over the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Attorney General Rob Bonta.