Tag: doj

Justice Department sues New Jersey for granting tuition support for illegals but not citizens

The Justice Department has filed a complaint against New Jersey laws that provide in-state tuition and financial assistance to illegal immigrants. 

The laws discriminate against U.S. citizens who aren’t granted the same tuition rates, scholarships and other subsidies, which is unconstitutional, according to the complaint.

“Imagine being denied the opportunity of education in your own country. By granting illegal aliens in-state tuition, the state of New Jersey is doing just that,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said in a statement. 

Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Justice Department’s Civil Division said that the agency wouldn’t tolerate U.S. citizens who are being treated like “second-class citizens in their own country.” 

“This is a simple matter of federal law: in New Jersey and nationwide, colleges cannot provide benefits to illegal aliens that they do not provide to U.S. citizens,” he said. 

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DOJ Sues New Jersey Over Mask Ban for Law Enforcement

The U.S. Department of Justice is suing New Jersey over a law that bars local, state, and federal law enforcement officers from wearing masks and requires them to show identification before making arrests.

Filed on April 29 in federal court in Newark, New Jersey, the lawsuit requests an injunction to block New Jersey’s Law Enforcement Officer Protection Act, which applies to all law enforcement officers, including federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

The Justice Department argues that the law is unconstitutional, calling it an “illegal attempt to regulate the federal government” and saying that it would compromise the safety of federal officers.

Threatening federal agents with prosecution for concealing their identities during detentions “chills the enforcement of federal law and compromises sensitive law enforcement operations,” the agency said.

“The Department of Justice will steadfastly protect the privacy and safety of law enforcement from unconstitutional state laws like New Jersey’s,” Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Justice Department’s Civil Division said in a statement.

In February, a federal judge preliminarily blocked a similar law in California that barred federal agents from concealing their faces while working.

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Trump DOJ, ATF Unleash Massive Second Amendment Overhaul — 34 New Reforms Slash Red Tape for Gun Owners, Dealers and Small Businesses

In a HUGE victory for the Second Amendment and law-abiding Americans everywhere, the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives announced this week they are unleashing 34 notices of final and proposed rulemaking to slash the mountain of Biden-era red tape strangling gun owners and Federal Firearms Licensees.

The move follows a top-to-bottom review of ATF regulations ordered by President Trump’s Executive Order 14206, “Protecting Second Amendment Rights.”

After years of the Biden ATF acting as an unaccountable attack dog against honest gun shops and citizens, the agency is finally being forced to listen to industry experts, FFLs, and everyday Americans who just want to exercise their God-given constitutional rights without the federal government breathing down their necks.

This is the first wave of reforms. More are coming. The Trump administration is keeping its promise to dismantle the deep-state gun-control apparatus piece by piece.

“The Second Amendment is not a second-class right,” said U.S. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “This Department of Justice is ending the weaponization of federal authority against law-abiding gun owners. We will continue to vigorously defend their rights as the Constitution demands.”

Below are the summary of the 34 proposed and final regulatory changes affecting firearms, explosives, importation, federal firearms licensees (FFLs), and ATF procedures.

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Federal Judge Dismisses DOJ Lawsuit Requesting Arizona Voter Data

A federal judge on April 28 dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) against Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes that sought access to state voter registration data.

Judge Susan Brnovich of the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona wrote in a 13-page ruling that Arizona’s voter registration list is “not a document subject to request by the Attorney General“ and that the DOJ did not provide sufficient argument to ”convince the court” to allow access to the data.

“Accordingly, the Court will dismiss the Attorney General’s claim with prejudice because amendment would be legally futile,” Brnovich wrote.

The DOJ filed its lawsuit against Fontes’s office in January, saying he refused to provide the department with the list in August 2025.

It asked for Fontes to provide the DOJ with “the current electronic copy of Arizona’s computerized statewide voter registration list, with all fields, including each registrant’s full name, date of birth, residential address, and either their state driver’s license number, the last four digits of their Social Security number, or [Help America Vote Act] unique identifier” within five days of a court order.

The DOJ had argued that the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act require that states maintain voter lists to ensure their accuracy. Further, it said that Congress provided the attorney general with the capacity to request state voting records under Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960.

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DOJ Sues Big Tech Giant Cloudera for Blocking American Workers in Favor of Foreign Visa Holders, Same Company Sued Trump in 2017 Over Refugee Ban

The Trump Department of Justice has filed a federal lawsuit against Cloudera Inc., a major Silicon Valley tech company, for deliberately discriminating against qualified American workers in favor of foreign visa holders for high-paying tech positions.

The Civil Rights Division’s lawsuit accuses Cloudera of violating the Immigration and Nationality Act by creating a sham, separate hiring process designed to deter and exclude American citizens while fast-tracking foreign workers on temporary visas.

“Employers cannot use the PERM sponsorship process as a backdoor for discriminating against U.S. workers,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said. “The Division will not hesitate to sue companies who intentionally deter U.S. workers from applying to American jobs.”

According to the DOJ, Cloudera set up a dedicated email address for job applications that was deliberately configured not to accept emails from outside the company.

American workers who followed the company’s posted instructions received automatic bounce-back messages stating that their applications could not be processed.

The DOJ said in a press release:

The complaint alleges Cloudera intentionally created a separate recruitment and hiring process to deter U.S. workers from applying, and also did not consider them, for lucrative technology jobs that the company earmarked for people with temporary employment visas. Cloudera created an email account that did not allow external emails, but still instructed applicants to use that unworkable email address to apply for jobs. The Division received a charge of employment discrimination from one U.S. worker who tried to apply using the email account Cloudera set up, but received a bounce back notification. When sponsoring current employees under the permanent labor certification program (PERM), Cloudera purposely failed to recruit U.S. workers in good faith.

At the same time, Cloudera was actively sponsoring foreign workers for permanent residency through the Department of Labor’s PERM program, a process that legally requires employers to make a genuine good-faith effort to recruit and hire qualified American workers first.

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More Than 40 Mexican Mafia Members And Associates Indicted In California: DOJ

A total of 43 alleged members and associates of the Mexican Mafia prison gang were arrested this week on multiple charges, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the central district of California said on April 23.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office said the total includes individuals already in custody, with 25 of them being arrested in Orange County, California, on April 23. They face charges including kidnapping, extortion, fentanyl and methamphetamine trafficking, running illegal gambling businesses, and murder.

First assistant U.S. attorney Bill Essayli said the arrests reflected joint efforts between federal and local law enforcement and their commitment to cracking down on violent felons and organized crime.

“Gang members who murder, extort, kidnap, and traffic drugs and firearms are a menace to our communities and our way of life,” Essayli said in a statement.

The investigation also led to the seizure of 4 kilograms (8.8 lbs) of fentanyl, 54.4 kilograms (120 lbs) of methamphetamine, 0.9 kilograms (2 lbs) of heroin, 3 kilograms (6.6 lbs) of cocaine, 25 firearms, and more than $30,000 in cash, according to the office.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office said the gang sold illegal drugs in Orange County and ran illicit gambling businesses within commercial strip malls and private residences. It also collected “extortionate taxes” and used violence to safeguard those gambling businesses, the office added.

One of the defendants, identified as Luis Cardenas, was accused of overseeing the gang’s criminal activities from his prison cell using “an encrypted messaging application on contraband cell phones” between June 2024 and April 2026. Cardenas allegedly instructed gang members to kidnap and assault those “in bad standing” with him.

Two other defendants—Matthew Kundrat and Manuel Ramos—were charged with murder that occurred at the Akua Inn, a gang-run motel in Anaheim, California, on Feb. 3, 2025. Prosecutors said the two allegedly committed the murder to be part of the Mexican Mafia and increase their standing within the gang.

“These defendants allegedly ran a ruthless criminal enterprise that murdered, kidnapped, extorted, and flooded our communities with deadly drugs,” FBI director Kash Patel said in a statement.

“The FBI will never stop working alongside our law enforcement partners to hold these individuals accountable and protect the people of Southern California.”

Some of the defendants made their initial appearances in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana and Los Angeles on April 23, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

The Mexican Mafia, also known as “La Eme,” is a U.S.-based prison gang that started in the 1950s. Federal authorities said the gang exerts “immense control” over Hispanic street gangs in Southern California, directing illegal activities from within prisons and taking a portion of the proceeds from drug trafficking, illegal gambling, and other crimes.

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Harmeet Dhillon Announces DOJ’s Big Win Defending xAI from Colorado DEI Law

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon announced a major win for American artificial intelligence (AI) dominance after her department intervened in a lawsuit challenging a new Colorado law that prohibits “algorithmic discrimination” during an interview on Breitbart News Saturday.

Speaking with Breitbart News political editor Bradley Jaye, Dhillon revealed details on the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) recent success at getting the state of Colorado to agree not to enforce SB24-205, which requires AI developers and deployers to satisfy certain disclosure, reporting, and prevention requirements when creating algorithm products designed for services like mortgage lending, student admissions, and job-candidate selection. 

The bill’s text included an explicit carveout for discriminatory algorithms designed to advance “diversity” or “redress historic discrimination,” and AI company xAI filed a lawsuit against the statute on April 9, alleging it is unconstitutional.

Marking the first time that the DOJ has intervened in a case challenging state regulations on AI, Dhillon’s team joined the case on behalf of xAI on Friday. Together, they argued that “embedding AI with state-mandated discrimination is a recipe for disaster.”

Emphasizing that the Civil Rights Division at the DOJ is meant to “protect American citizens, and even American companies, from discrimination on the basis of impermissible racial, gender, et cetera criteria,” Dhillon told Jaye that Colorado had attempted to require companies and municipalities to “look at outcomes and then racially balance and adjust their algorithms to produce outcomes that reflect the demographic population.”

“This is not required by law. In fact, it’s prohibited by federal law,” she stated. “And you know, worse, the statute actually carved out if people or companies are doing discrimination to remedy past discrimination, that’s okay. All of this is just nonsense, and it stifles innovation, and it’s illegal under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

In addition to violating the Fourteenth Amendment, Dhillon noted that xAI also has First Amendment arguments against the bill, “because, effectively, the state is compelling it to utter certain speech in furtherance of these DEI goals.”

“We’re not arguing that because the government doesn’t have that obligation, but we’re stepping in to protect American citizens and American companies,” she explained, before revealing the success of her efforts on Friday. 

“We had a great result yesterday,” Dhillon announced, recounting how Colorado “agreed to not enforce the law against xAI” within just a couple of hours of the DOJ intervening. 

“And by the evening, before we went to bed, we had Colorado agree to not enforce it against anybody until they send it back to the legislature to fix it,” she explained. “So it’s pretty much a total win for American consumers and companies, and the first instance of the United States Department of Justice stepping in on an AI case to really protect this innovation and protect Americans from discrimination by AI algorithmic manipulation.”

Highlighting why civil rights work should be “important” to people on the right side of the political aisle, Dhillon told Jaye that conservatives “have come to look at civil rights as something that’s been weaponized against Americans, but civil rights are for all Americans.”

“So what we’re doing in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division is exactly that — we’re standing up for all Americans, like in this xAI case.”

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DOJ joins Musk’s AI company in suing Colorado for new ‘DEI’ regulatory law

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced its support for Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, as it sues the state of Colorado over a new law set to go into effect in June that would regulate AI technology.

The company filed a suit against Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser on Thursday to prevent the enforcement of the law, which would impose new requirements on AI programs to protect users from “algorithmic discrimination” in education, employment, healthcare, housing and financial services, and other sectors.

xAI argued that the statute “severely burdens the development and use of AI” and infringes on First Amendment free speech protections.

“Its provisions prohibit developers of AI systems from producing speech that the State of Colorado dislikes, while compelling them to conform their speech to a State-enforced orthodoxy on controversial topics of great public concern,” the lawsuit reads.

It also claims that the law would force Musk’s company to rework its AI chatbot called Grok, which can be found on the social media platform X, to “conform to a controversial, highly politicized viewpoint” instead of maintaining its objectivity.

The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division announced on Friday that it partnered with the Civil Division to file a motion to intervene in the suit.

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said in a video posted to social media that the state law in question requires companies to comply with its “crazy, woke, DEI goals,” referring to the “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” policies instated widely across left-leaning and liberal organizations.

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DOJ Approves Firing Squads for Federal Death Penalty Cases

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has authorized firing squads, electrocution, and gassing as a means of execution in federal cases.

In a press release on April 24, the department said it was directing the Bureau of Prisons to expand its execution protocol to include firing squads, lethal injection with pentobarbital, and other methods. It’s part of a broader report on the death penalty following President Donald Trump’s executive order to reinstate capital punishment at the federal level.

President Joe Biden had instituted a moratorium on executions and commuted the death sentences of almost all federal death-row inmates before he left office.

One of the first actions to be taken is to readopt the lethal injection protocol used during the first Trump administration. Trump also rescinded Biden administration policies the press release describes as “efforts to erode the death penalty.”

In addition to establishing a moratorium on federal death penalties and commuting the death sentences of 37 inmates on federal death row, the Biden administration discontinued lethal injection because it carried the risk of “unnecessary pain and suffering.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which opposes capital punishment, did not respond to a request for comment on this story. However, on its website it stated its opposition to Trump’s plans.

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Rep. Anna Paulina Luna Demands Full Pardon for U.S. Special Forces Hero Prosecuted by DOJ for ‘Insider Trading’ on Maduro Raid – “Skewed Justice” While Congress Members Illegally Profit Every Single Day

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna is demanding a full pardon for a U.S. Special Forces soldier now facing decades in prison after allegedly profiting from classified information tied to the takedown of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro.

The soldier, identified as Gannon Ken Van Dyke, was indicted by the Department of Justice on Thursday.

According to the DOJ, Van Dyke, an active-duty Army soldier stationed at Fort Bragg, participated in the planning and execution of a covert mission dubbed “Operation Absolute Resolve,” which resulted in the capture of Maduro earlier this year.

Prosecutors allege that Van Dyke used his access to classified intelligence to place wagers on the prediction platform Polymarket, ultimately netting approximately $409,000 in profits.

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