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President Donald Trump on Thursday did what few American presidents have ever done—issue explicit electoral endorsements to foreign candidates for the highest political office in electoral democracies.

“[Japanese] Prime Minister [Sanae] Takaichi is someone who deserves powerful recognition for the job she and her Coalition are doing and, therefore, as President of the United States of America, it is my Honor to give a Complete and Total Endorsement of her, and what her highly respected Coalition is representing,” the president Truth-Socialed Thursday afternoon, ahead of Japan’s snap elections this weekend.

Minutes later, Trump reiterated the favor for longtime Hungarian Prime Minister (and role model for America’s illiberal-conservative movement) Viktor Orbán, who faces a more uphill struggle in his country’s April elections. Orbán, the president stated, is

a truly strong and powerful Leader, with a proven track record of delivering phenomenal results. He fights tirelessly for, and loves, his Great Country and People, just like I do for the United States of America. Viktor works hard to Protect Hungary, Grow the Economy, Create Jobs, Promote Trade, Stop Illegal Immigration, and Ensure LAW AND ORDER! Relations between Hungary and the United States have reached new heights of cooperation and spectacular achievement under my Administration, thanks largely to Prime Minister Orbán. I look forward to continuing working closely with him so that both of our Countries can further advance this tremendous path to SUCCESS and cooperation. I was proud to ENDORSE Viktor for Re-Election in 2022, and am honored to do so again. Viktor Orbán is a true friend, fighter, and WINNER, and has my Complete and Total Endorsement for Re-Election as Prime Minister of Hungary — HE WILL NEVER LET THE GREAT PEOPLE OF HUNGARY DOWN!

Trump has additionally, during his convention-bending second presidency, endorsed Argentinian President Javier Milei and Honduran President Nasry Asfura.

American presidents have traditionally eschewed outright endorsements in non-authoritarian electoral contests for a handful of sensible reasons, beginning with the fact that bilateral relations will be materially soured, and/or produce a reciprocally partisan response, if the other candidate happens to win.

Barack Obama accelerated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upfront and controversial alignment with the Republican Party by having his State Department give an allegedly peace-process-supporting $350,000 grant to an organization that spent some of it on an “anyone but Bibi” political campaign. “It is completely unacceptable that U.S. taxpayer dollars were used to build a political campaign infrastructure that was deployed …against the leader of our closest ally in the Middle East,” Sen. Rob Portman (R–Ohio) said after a withering bipartisan report on the matter in 2016.

Putting the world’s largest thumbs on the scales of smaller and weaker countries can also contribute to the eventual downfall of endorsees who win, as it arguably did to Boris Yeltsin after Bill Clinton’s extensive meddling in 1996.

As that example illustrates, U.S. presidents have both fallible judgment and extensively tempting power at their fingertips. Clinton knew Yeltsin was a corrupt drunk, but plausibly feared a Communist resurgence so much that he reckoned a little timely pressure on the International Monetary Fund was worth it, especially if he could buy the Russians’ effective silence on NATO expansion. By the time Yeltsin wobbled out of office, his handpicked successor, then–little known KGB veteran Vladimir Putin, was gifted a wide, popular lane of cracking down on oligarchical excess and his predecessor’s diplomatic squandering of Russia’s Near Abroad.

It was during the Clinton years that I first developed an allergy to even implicit White House preferences in faraway elections. Ironically, it was due to Washington’s antipathy toward a politician who very much resembles both Donald Trump and the 21st century version of Viktor Orbán: Slovakia’s Vladimír Mečiar.

Mečiar, a crude and often funny brute fond of suing journalists and spinning conspiracy theories, was routinely and hyperbolically misportrayed in the international media as someone eager to lead Slovakia back into the depths of communism. (He in fact had been punished for anti–Communist Party activities in the late 1960s.) Everybody knew who Clinton and the various governmental and quasi-governmental bodies—the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, various regional “enterprise funds,” and so forth—preferred to see win.

Turns out that—who knew!—nationalist populists can make great political hay out of disdain from foreign elites. As ever, governmental interventions can produce consequences opposite their purported intent.

These are not the only reasons to oppose presidential endorsement of foreigners. Personalizing electoral contests self-evidently gives endorsers a personal stake in the outcomes, generating interests that can conflict with what’s best for the country. Trump pardoned Asfura’s party mate and predecessor, the convicted cocaine trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández, just days before the Honduran election, despite concurrently ordering the murder of suspected drug runners in the Gulf of Mexico. He goosed Milei’s pre-election prospects with a highly unusual currency swap and peso purchase. Japan’s Takaichi, whether to secure her own endorsement or a reduced tariff hike, endorsed Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize and gifted him some golf swag.

Americans tend to recoil at foreign countries expressing or acting upon interest in our elections. Long before (Democratic-pushed) Russiagate, there was (Republican-pushed) Chinagate and myriad forgotten scandals such as John Kerry boasting of (and then retreating from) international support in 2004. (“It is simply not appropriate for any foreign leader to endorse a candidate in America’s presidential election,” Kerry adviser Rand Beers said, trying to put that one to bed.) Trump doling out endorsements is guaranteed to produce more foreign-leader endorsements of American candidates.

The world-weary shruggers among us, including not a few intervention-skeptics, may retort that the United States has meddled quite a bit further in foreign elections than mere endorsement or financial lever-pull. To which one might reply, exactly. Especially, though not only, with the Cold War (and all of the compromises thereof) in our rearview mirror, I do not seek to return to promiscuous American involvement in overseas electoral politics, because that way eventually lies armed conflict and the smothering of smaller-country self-responsibility.

Donald Trump and his successors have history’s largest and most lethal military, a vast deep-state spying and skullduggery apparatus utterly unaccountable to the people paying for it, and (for the time being) a National Security Strategy that seeks to halt the “civilizational erasure” of our closest allies by encouraging “patriotic European parties” and cultivating “resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” Adding explicit political endorsements to this unhealthy mix is a recipe for wholly avoidable tragedy.

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On Wednesday, a federal judge in Oregon issued an order barring Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents from conducting warrantless arrests without first finding that an individual is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained in accordance with federal law. 

The order stems from a lawsuit brought by the nonprofit law firm Innovation Law Lab, which accuses immigration enforcement agencies of engaging in a “detain first, justify later” pattern of practice that violates federal law. Under federal law, immigration agents may conduct a warrantless arrest only if the officer has both a “reason to believe” a person is violating an immigration law or regulation and is “likely to escape” before a warrant can be obtained. Critically, without both findings, an officer lacks the requisite probable cause to make a lawful arrest. 

During a hearing earlier this week, U.S. District Judge Mustafa Kasubhai heard evidence of immigration agents conducting warrantless arrests without making such a determination. One plaintiff, Victor Cruz Gamez, a 56-year-old grandfather, testified that he was held in immigration detention for three weeks following his unlawful warrantless arrest, according to the Associated Press. Gamez told the court that he was arrested after being pulled over by immigration agents despite having a driver’s license and a work permit, items that can be used as evidence that Gamez was not, in fact, “likely to escape” before a warrant could be obtained. 

Whether an individual is likely to escape is usually determined by considering factors like whether the person’s identity is known to the arresting officer, whether the person has previously evaded authorities, and any ties or lack thereof the person has to the community, including family and employment. 

Following the hearing, Kasubhai issued a preliminary injunction barring immigration agents from conducting warrantless arrests “without a pre-arrest individualized determination…of probable cause that the person being arrested is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained.” Similar orders have also been recently issued in Washington, D.C., and Colorado. Immigration agents were also found to be flouting federal law in Chicago, where a federal judge ordered the release of over 600 immigrant detainees who were unlawfully arrested without a warrant.  

In response to the news of the order, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told Fox News that the “case really isn’t really about arrest procedures or legal standards” and accused “open-borders groups and activist judges” of trying to stop President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. “It won’t work. DHS conducts enforcement operations in line with the U.S. Constitution and all applicable federal laws without fear, favor, or prejudice and will continue to do so,” McLaughlin said. 

However, just last week, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Todd Lyons, issued a memo with new guidance attempting to rewrite the agency’s definition of “likely to escape,” arguing that previous interpretations were “unreasoned” and “incorrect.” Under this new interpretation, a person is “likely to escape” if “he or she is unlikely to be located at the scene of the encounter or another clearly identifiable location once an administrative warrant is obtained.” Such an interpretation gives immigration agents more authority to arrest immigrants who have close ties to the community but who might leave the scene after an immigration stop. 

Whether the government has the authority to hold someone in custody is a question of paramount importance to liberty. And although the Trump administration’s attempt to rewrite federal law to suit its practices is alarming, at least for now, some courts are willing to uphold the rule of law.

The post Once Again, a Federal Judge Orders ICE to Stop Unlawful Warrantless Arrests appeared first on Reason.com.

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A federal judge in Chicago today ordered evidence unsealed in the case of Marimar Martinez, a U.S. citizen who was shot five times by a Customs and Border Protection officer last October.

U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Illinois Georgia Alexakis ruled that Martinez had shown good cause for the release of text messages and body camera footage from the officer who shot her, while the government had shown “zero concern” for Martinez’s reputation.

Martinez’s attorneys have been pressing to unseal the evidence because the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) refuses to retract its previous statements calling Martinez a “domestic terrorist,” despite federal prosecutors dropping the charges against her. If the government won’t correct the record, they argued, Martinez should have the opportunity to do it herself.

Alexakis agreed. “Ms. Martinez is a United States citizen. She’s a resident of this district. And under our legal system, she is presumed innocent of any offense of which she has not been convicted,” the judge said at today’s hearing.

Border Patrol officer Charles Exum shot Martinez five times on October 4 after a traffic incident in Chicago. Martinez says she was following the officers in her car and blowing her horn to warn others of their presence before the CBP vehicle sideswiped her. In a press release issued the same day as the shooting, DHS claimed that agents were “boxed in by 10 cars” when Martinez’s vehicle “rammed” their car. Officers were forced to fire defensive shots, the government claimed, when “a suspect tried to run them over.” The statement also said Martinez had a history of doxxing federal agents and was armed with a “semi-automatic weapon.”

Martinez and a man in the car, Anthony Santos Ruiz, were charged with multiple counts of impeding and assaulting federal law enforcement officers with a deadly weapon.

However, Martinez’s attorneys say the sealed body camera footage shows Martinez never rammed them, officers were never boxed in or obstructed (there were only two cars, not 10), and she never threatened officers with her car. What the sealed footage does show, Martinez’s lawyers told the Chicago Sun-Times, is an agent saying, “Do something, bitch,” shortly before crashing into Martinez.

Some of Exum’s text messages regarding the shooting were released in November. In one, he sent a link to a news story about the shooting and wrote, “Read it. Five shots, seven holes. I fired five rounds and she had seven holes. Put that in your book, boys.”

Later in November, federal prosecutors filed a motion to dismiss the charges and exonerate Martinez and Ruiz.

Despite that, the DHS has continued to attack Martinez in public statements. Following the dismissal of the case against her, the department told Chicago news outlet ABC7 that, “Border Patrol law enforcement officers were ambushed by domestic terrorists.…Our law enforcement shows incredible restraint and prudence in their exercise of force.”

In a story published January 31, NPR asked the DHS if it had plans to delete or update its statements on Martinez. DHS responded: “Border Patrol law enforcement officers were ambushed by domestic terrorists that rammed federal agents with their vehicles. The woman, Marimar Martinez, driving one of the vehicles, was armed with a semi-automatic weapon and has a history of doxing federal agents.”

Martinez’s attorneys say she is a 30-year-old Montessori school teacher with a legal concealed carry license, and that the allegations of “doxxing” are false.

Martinez originally agreed to keep the materials in the case sealed, but she changed her mind after the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration officers in Minnesota. The DHS Office of Public Affairs has repeatedly issued false statements about incidents regarding use-of-force incidents by immigration officers, including in the recent fatal shootings of Good and Pretti.

“I am their voice,” Martinez said in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ, “I am here for a reason.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago agreed to the release of body camera footage but argued against unsealing more of Exum’s text messages. Lawyers for the U.S. government claimed in court filings that “the release of these messages after the charges against Ms. Martinez have been dismissed with prejudice will serve only to further sully Agent Exum, his family, and co-workers without any corresponding benefit to Ms. Martinez.”

In a court filing in response, Martinez’s attorneys said the irony of the government’s sudden concern about ruining someone’s reputation was “shocking.”

“Agent Exum sent these messages in the minutes, hours, and days after the shooting. These are his words,” the filing by Martinez’s attorneys said. “To the extent they would ‘sully’ his reputation more than his previously disclosed disgusting text messages already have, it is a fully deserved self-imposed sullying. Marimar Martinez had no say in being branded as a ‘domestic terrorist’ by her government. The Government drafted those words. The Government sent those words out to the world. Unlike Exum, she never had a say in the things being written about her, as opposed to Exum having had full say in the things he chose to write and disseminate.”

Alexakis denied Martinez’s request to also unseal automated license plate reader data collected by the government during its investigation of her.

Rep. Jesús “Chuy” Garcia (D–Illinois) announced this week that Martinez would be his guest at President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address to Congress later this month.

“Who knows? Maybe President Trump will even at that point retract the domestic terrorist label of her, which would be great and she would be there to see it,” Christopher Parente, Martinez’s attorney, told reporters outside a federal courthouse following the ruling.

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Elon Musk is a fan of the cyberpunk aesthetic. We know that much from his failed marriage with synth-pop singer Grimes and Grok’s AI companion Ani. But his obsession with this style has landed him in a legal battle that has serious implications for copyright law in the age of artificial intelligence.

Judge George Wu of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ruled Thursday that Alcon Entertainment, the production company that owns the rights to Blade Runner 2049, may continue its copyright case against Elon Musk and Tesla. Alcon’s lawsuit stems from Musk displaying an AI-generated image for 11 seconds at Tesla’s October 2024 Cybercab showcase, during which he said, “I love Blade Runner, but I don’t know if we want that future. I think we want that duster he’s wearing, but not the bleak apocalypse.”

When Alcon filed its suit later that month, the company said it denied Musk permission to use the above image from Blade Runner 2049. After this denial, Alcon alleged that the Tesla CEO provided the still, and others like it, to an AI-driven image generator to create the following:

Accordingly, Alcon alleged that defendants “or the image generation tool that they used” violated their copyright in the sci-fi blockbuster under the Copyright Act and the Lanham Act, which prohibits the commercial use of any symbol that is likely to cause confusion “as to the origin, sponsorship, or approval of…goods, services, or commercial activities by another person.” In its amended complaint, Alcon claims that Blade Runner 2049 is now “unfortunately and falsely…affiliated” with Tesla and Musk, diminishing its brand value by “at least…six figures.”

Alcon alleges that Musk violated the company’s exclusive reproduction rights by “copying image A…into an AI generator” and violated its derivative work rights through “substantial similarity copying” in Image C. In other words, Musk allegedly violated Alcon’s copyright over Blade Runner 2049 in two ways: first, by copying stills from the movie without authorization; second, by producing a final product that invokes protected elements from the movie without permission.

Musk argues that the substantial similarity claim is meritless because the 12 elements identified by Alcon (including the post-apocalyptic setting and “society fac[ing] a critical decision whether humans and AI will build a joint society or not”) are “described in exceedingly broad terms [and] are only general ideas or concepts.” He also argues the allegation of literal copying is invalid because it only applies to “non-actionable ‘intermediate copying.'”

Wu’s ruling did not address whether the image Musk showed was substantially similar to the still from Blade Runner 2049, but rejected the second claim because, in “the age of AI…copyright infringement lawsuits involving what might be understood as ‘intermediate copying’ are proceeding,” and that they do “not appear to require an assessment of ‘substantial similarity'” between copyrighted material and final content.” To support this conclusion, Wu cited Bartz v. Anthropic (2025), which found that AI developers, “may need to pay for getting their hands on a [copyrighted work] in the first instance,” but that it is not a copyright violation to use legally acquired works to generate a novel product.

Wu’s ruling will set a precedent for copyright holders to sue anyone whom they assume illegally copied their intellectual property to create something entirely unmistakable for it because the cases will be less likely to be dismissed. This means an increase in the expected cost of using generative AI—litigation is expensive—and a corresponding decrease in creative, productive uses of this revolutionary technology.

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