Page B1From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 26 September 2026
As it ran on the front
A federal judge has now confirmed that the administration deported a man to El Salvador in violation of not one court order, not two, but three — the number sits there in the filing like a bill nobody paid on time. Then the part that turns a paperwork story into a person: this happened to him twice. The government did not miss a deadline once and scramble to fix it. It sent the same man to the same country in defiance of the same court, a second time, after being told in writing, three separate times, not to.
That filing landed on a docket three weeks after a different federal judge, in California, closed the books on a different case built from the same administration's paperwork. In a 90-page ruling issued August 29th, Judge Noël Wise found that the government's use of immigration law to cancel the visas of international students who had criticized Israel's conduct in Gaza violated the First Amendment right to speak and the Fifth Amendment right to due process before the government upends your life. Read the two rulings side by side and they are not two stories.…
…(cont) The contempt order does not ask why. It asks what happened, in order, with citations, and it answers itself. Three orders. One man. Twice deported. The visa case answers a companion question the contempt order does not bother to ask, because a court does not need a motive to write down a fact: whether the pattern in Maryland was an accident. It was not filed as one. Read together, on the same public docket, they are the paperwork of an administration that keeps being told, in writing, to stop — and keeps making more of the same paper. Check the docket yourself. It is public record, and it is short enough to read before lunch.
“They got caught defying three court orders to ship one guy to El Salvador, twice, and three weeks earlier a different judge caught the same administration doing the same trick on students who spoke up about Gaza. That's not two stories, that's one printer running the same order over and over. When a government stops answering to its own courts, the next name on that list is whoever they decide not to like this week.”
“Look, three court orders, sure, but nobody specifically said "do not ever try this again" — the administration has an obligation to enforce immigration law, and sometimes a case gets reprocessed. As for the students, that ruling doesn't even weigh national security, and it's ninety pages, I haven't read all of it, nobody's read all of it. This is clearly a rogue judge situation. Two rogue judges. Rogue is the word. Did I say rogue? Forget I said rogue.”
The receipts
Republicans' reconciliation package puts $70 billion into ICE's department NBC News, May 2026
Judge finds Trump administration in contempt for twice deporting asylum-seekerA federal judge has found the Trump administration in contempt for deporting an asylum-seeker to El Salvador in violation of three court orders.
· Trump admin unjustly revoked pro-Palestinian foreign students' visas, judge finds from the morgue, 29 Aug 2026
· Federal judge says US cannot deport noncitizen students who criticize Israel from the morgue, 29 Aug 2026
· Judge Rules the Trump Admin Can't Deport International Students for Free Speech from the morgue, 29 Aug 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.