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The Department of Homeland Security announced on Tuesday that its top spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, would depart the agency after just over a year on the job. To most, McLaughlin is probably best known for slandering Americans wounded or killed by immigration agents—including Renee Good (whom she accused of “domestic terrorism”) and Alex Pretti (whom she claimed sought to “massacre law enforcement”). Inside the legal system, though, McLaughlin is known for something else: Actively sabotaging the Department of Homeland Security in court through her crass, often false public statements. Most notably, McLaughlin has gained notoriety for smearing judges who rule against the Trump administration, deriding them as “activist,” “craven,” “out of control” partisans engaged in “judicial sabotage,” “race-baiting,” and stoking “the embers of hatred.”
President Donald Trump has praised her tactics, but they have done her department no favors in front of these judges. It was perhaps inevitable that judges would bristle at a government spokeswoman deriding them as hacks. But McLaughlin did not merely alienate the judiciary; she consistently undermined the administration’s legal arguments, sabotaging lawyers’ efforts to cover up unlawful conduct by boasting about it on social media. Judges then cited these posts to refute the administration’s claims and rule against it. Few if any government spokespeople have done more to kneecap their own agency in court than McLaughlin.
The gap between this administration’s public statements and legal assertions has been a stubborn problem since Trump returned to office, but nowhere is it more chasmic than DHS. In their briefings, government lawyers finesse a sanitized version into a clean narrative of law-abiding responsibility. At hearings, they insist that the department adheres to high standards of professionalism and good-faith compliance. But McLaughlin’s confrontational declarations to the press routinely punctured this fiction. And lawyers suing DHS pointed judges toward her messaging as evidence of the agency’s real actions and policies—which were, quite often, flagrantly illegal.
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Escobar Molina v. DHS illustrates this pattern perfectly. It marked a challenge to immigration agents’ widespread warrantless arrests of suspected immigrants in the District of Columbia, which seemingly targeted anyone who appeared Hispanic. The plaintiffs—lawful residents and American citizens caught up in the dragnet—sued, alleging violations of a statute that allows warrantless arrests only when agents have “probable cause” that an individual is undocumented. In court, lawyers for the department attested that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection rigorously adhered to this standard. Outside of court, however, McLaughlin kept contradicting them, asserting over and over again that immigration agents did not require probable cause to arrest a person suspected of lacking lawful status. To the contrary, she said that agents merely required “reasonable suspicion,” a much more lenient standard. This was not a one-off: McLaughlin repeated her claim over and over again, and amplified it from DHS’s official accounts.
Judge Beryl Howell was not pleased with this discrepancy. At one hearing, she ordered government lawyers to explain whether they or McLaughlin were stating the agency’s true position. The lawyers tried to dismiss McLaughlin’s comments, saying she did not “necessarily understand” “legal terms of art” because she was not a lawyer. “This,” Howell later wrote, “is a remarkable assertion.” The government seemed to be saying that McLaughlin was “ignorant or incompetent, or both.” Howell scolded the lawyers for their failure to “prevent these statements from being made in DHS’s official communications to the public.” And she concluded that McLaughlin’s statements must be “taken at face value as reflecting the current policy and practice of DHS and federal law enforcement agents making civil immigration arrests.” Howell then issued an injunction barring warrantless immigration arrests without probable cause in D.C. (The government says it will appeal her ruling but has not yet done so.)
McLaughlin also helped to botch ICE’s efforts to keep immigration activist Jeanette Vizguerra-Ramirez locked up without bond. Federal agents arrested Vizguerra-Ramirez while she was on a work break from Target, just one day after she marched against Trump in a widely publicized protest. ICE boasted of the arrest online, and McLaughlin took a victory lap on X, writing: “We will find, arrest, and deport illegal aliens regardless of if they were a featured ‘Time Person of the Year.’ ” The implication seemed to be that ICE had singled out Vizguerra-Ramirez to send a message that no immigrant was safe.
The courts paid attention. Judge Nina Wang later pointed to this tweet as evidence that the administration “sought to make an example of Ms. Vizguerra-Ramirez by arresting and detaining an individual with a high profile as a labor and immigration activist.” McLaughlin’s brag that the government had snagged a well-known advocate raised “unique due process concerns,” Wang wrote, and contributed to her conclusion that Vizguerra-Ramirez’s detention violated the Fifth Amendment. Wang ordered a bond hearing, and Vizguerra-Ramirez was quickly released. She remains free today and continues to challenge her order of removal.
McLaughlin’s X account has, in fact, routinely corroborated plaintiffs’ claims that DHS is violating the Constitution. In one case challenging the revocation of student visas because of anti-Israel activism, the government argued that it was merely trying to avoid “adverse foreign policy consequences,” not punishing protected speech. Judge Noël Wise didn’t buy it, pointing to McLaughlin’s insistence that those “pushing Hamas propaganda” and similar “anti-American conduct” would see their visas revoked. Wise cited McLaughlin’s warning as evidence that the government was retaliating against “expression related to Israel and Palestine,” denying the government’s motion to dismiss the case. Judge William Young also cited McLaughlin’s post in ruling that the administration had violated the First Amendment by detaining and deporting pro-Gaza activists. DHS lawyers spent many hours camouflaging their speech suppression in neutral terms, only to see McLaughlin tweet out the real—and unconstitutional—reason for the crackdown.
Sometimes McLaughlin stepped on more prosaic rakes. In a case challenging immigration agents’ excessive force against protesters, the government argued that the plaintiffs lacked standing because the threat of future violence was too speculative. This contention seemed to be bolstered by a credible news report that immigration agents would imminently end the surge and, with it, the plaintiffs’ need for relief. But McLaughlin promptly refuted the report on X, writing: “We aren’t leaving Chicago.” Judge Sara Ellis then used her post to show that the threat of continued violence was all too real, granting the protesters standing.
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It’s easy to see why McLaughlin believed she could undermine or contradict her agency’s official position in court without consequence. Trump posts bizarre and aggressive rants on Truth Social all the time, yet courts mostly ignore his late-night ramblings. But that’s because the Supreme Court has shied away from using a president’s public comments as proof of policy, preferring to focus on official communications like executive orders (ostensibly out of respect for the office). The rules for DHS are different: SCOTUS subjects agencies to far more scrutiny and demands that they tell the truth about their decisions. Federal courts may block agency actions that are “arbitrary and capricious,” and statements by a spokesperson can be evidence that an agency is breaking the law.
McLaughlin’s departure may therefore be bittersweet news to the many lawyers now litigating against DHS. Sure, she vilified immigrants, smeared protesters, and attacked judges. Sometimes, though, she also told the truth, in ways that were inadvertently beneficial to the targets of her ire. If she is replaced by a more disciplined spokesperson, the courts may have a more difficult time smoking out the real, lawless policies driving Trump’s mass deportation machine. McLaughlin’s comments were reliably abhorrent. But they were, with remarkable frequency, also a smoking gun.
