Mike Fox

The Shield Reclaimed: How the Grand Jury Is Dismantling the Weaponization of the State In Washington and across the country, the grand jury is shedding its reputation as a rubber stamp and reclaiming its constitutional role as a shield. These citizens are no longer willing to be the sil...

My Cato colleague @foxmike90.bsky.social on the grand jury in its finest hour

These are all good but there's NO ENFORCEMENT MECHANISM PROVIDED. We need:
-universal, nationwide injunction authority
-right of states and localities to investigate/prosecute
-codify Bivens, right to sue ICE/no qualified immunity

ICE’s No. 1 Ally The Department of Justice has rushed to shield federal agents from accountability and launched needless criminal investigations into Minnesota officials and residents.

The U.S. Dept. of Justice has been all over Minnesota: it "has shielded federal agents from accountability, launched needless criminal investigations into Minnesota officials and residents, and pumped out propaganda to aid the far-right press in justifying ICE’s tactics." [@qjurecic.bsky.social]

Fear of immigration raids undermines Minnesota health care Patients and workers are avoiding health care facilities as immigration crackdown continues to roil the state.

Op-ed with my colleague and physician Jeff Singer: "The ongoing immigration enforcement crackdown in Minnesota is already producing a familiar yet increasingly harmful side effect: Patients are avoiding doctors’ offices, clinics and hospitals out of fear." www.minnpost.com/community-vo...

This is fantastic, appreciate the shoutout!

Y'all don't appreciate the @cato.org for doing yeoman's work in fighting Government Overreach in the #Trump era. Maybe the only think tank with ideological consistency anymore.

License to Kill? The Legal Black Hole of Federal Misconduct As long as the Supreme Court continues on its trajectory of insulating government officials from accountability and Congress remains missing in action, federal agents will operate with the knowledge t...

Why we can't bring ICE and Border Patrol to justice: my @cato.org colleague @foxmike90.bsky.social explains how we got the artificial legal hurdles that make our constitutional rights almost unenforceable when federal agents like those occupying Minneapolis trample them underfoot.

Juries must not act as a rubber stamp for the state, and their independence is essential. "An impartial jury is not one that does exactly what it is told; it is one that understands it has the power to simply say ‘no'," writes my Cato colleague @foxmike90.bsky.social: www.cato.org/news-release...

ICE Is Imposing Autocracy in Minnesota The state has become Trump's most radical experiment with militarized government.

"This is wrong. And every American whose capacity for moral judgment has not been addled by partisan derangement should recognize it....Probable cause, rights of accused, the need for search warrants, due process of any kind—ICE is proceeding as if such restrictions on gov't power no longer exist."

Opinion | Renee Good wasn’t the first person shot in her car by ICE. The justification followed a familiar script. Mike Fox: The officer who shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis might never have to defend his actions before a judge or jury.

“Since July, #immigration agents have shot at least six people behind the wheel of a vehicle… In each instance, the playbook is the same: the agent claims self-defense, asserting they ‘feared for their life’ as a vehicle was ‘weaponized’ against them.”
@foxmike90.bsky.social @cato.org @ms.now

Opinion | Renee Good wasn’t the first person shot in her car by ICE. The justification followed a familiar script. Mike Fox: The officer who shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis might never have to defend his actions before a judge or jury.

This specific phrasing is very very common in these cases: officers say the escalation in violence is self-defense, that they “feared for their life” when a car was “weaponized" against them. From Cato's @foxmike90.bsky.social today: www.ms.now/opinion/ice-...

Singleton v. Hamm Brief: Federal Courthouses Should Hear Over-Detention Claims The plaintiffs allege that the defendants imprisoned them beyond the time limits allowed by this law.

Lawsuit says Alabama kept inmates past date of legally required release. District court tossed it on the basis of so-called Heck doctrine barring civil rights challenges to intact sentences, but Cato amicus brief urges Eleventh Circuit to reverse, since the suit didn't challenge their sentences.

The Most Important Immigration Stories of 2025 Despite the hailstorm of attacks, however, immigrants continue to help Americans, reducing government deficits, innovating and starting businesses, growing the economy, increasing the availability of ...

Top 5 immigration stories of 2025:
1. Unprecedented broad bans on legal immigration
2. Stripping millions of lawful status
3. Deprioritization of criminals
4. Papers-please racial profiling
5. Serious attacks on the Constitution www.cato.org/blog/most-im...

The Most Important Immigration Stories of 2025 Despite the hailstorm of attacks, however, immigrants continue to help Americans, reducing government deficits, innovating and starting businesses, growing the economy, increasing the availability of ...

My colleague @davidjbier.bsky.social picks as the most important immigration stories of 2025: broad bans on henceforth-legal immigrants; cancellation of lawful statuses; de-prioritization of criminals; "papers-please" profiling; and a broad assault on constitutional rights of speech, privacy, etc.

Combatting Overcriminalization Please join us as we hear first-hand accounts, discuss what went wrong, explore how Cato got involved, and consider solutions to the pathology of unjust prosecutions and convictions.

www.cato.org/events/comba...

DC peeps: By all accounts, John, Tanner, and I never should have crossed paths. Then again, by all accounts, John and Tanner shouldn't have found themselves ensnared in our criminal justice system. Now I'm hosting them next month. Join us.

These congressmen want to give you the right to sue federal law enforcement for violating your rights The proposed bills aim to codify a 1971 Supreme Court ruling that allowed individuals to sue the feds for Fourth Amendment violations.

Restoring Bivens rights: one bill "would allow citizens to sue for damages resulting from constitutional violations committed by federal officers," while the other "would create a cause of action against federal law enforcement agencies and police depts for constitutional violations."

Schemel v. Marco Island Modern surveillance tools such as ALPRs, military-grade drones, enhanced security cameras, and other cutting-edge sensors let the government monitor millions of people with ease.

Modern surveillance tools like automated license plate readers “let the gov’t monitor millions of people with ease. Law enforcement can track movements, detect faces, record conversations— & store such information indefinitely.” Cato brief urges Eleventh Circuit to recognize Fourth Amendment claim.

If the international students had run a newspaper this way, Trump would’ve closed Harvard and banned all foreign students. As it is, he’s basically demanding that Harvard subsidize these “conservatives” on its campus in the name of ideological diversity

A retired policeman was jailed over an anti-Trump meme. Now he’s suing. Attorneys for 61-year-old Larry Bushart say a Tennessee sheriff violated the First Amendment: “In America, we do not jail people for political speech.”

A retired Tennessee policeman who spent more than a month in jail over an anti-Trump Facebook post is suing the authorities responsible for his arrest.

“In America, we do not jail people for political speech,” the lawsuit states.

Fentanyl as a WMD? The War on Opioids Reaches a New Level of Misinformation The state of denial increases susceptiblity to misinformation.

From my colleague Jeffrey Singer back in 2019. Labeling fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction is one of those terrible ideas that keeps coming back because it serves the ambitions of those in power.

On Dec. 4, DOJ labeled people who impede or "dox" ICE agents "domestic terrorists." I document how DHS believes following, recording, and protesting agents is "impeding," and has a policy of threatening & arresting ICE observers. That's unconstitutional. www.cato.org/blog/dhs-pol...

Parchment Barriers v. The Carceral State: The Bill of Rights at 234 The history of the Bill of Rights is a history of struggle—between the state’s desire for efficiency and control and the individual’s right to liberty and fair procedure.

"The Bill of Rights devotes more space to criminal procedure than any other topic—and that’s no accident. The Framers understood the threat posed by a despotic regime." @foxmike90.bsky.social celebrates today's Bill of Rights Day.

Trump's DOJ Called a Sandwich a Threat. Jurors Rightly Disagreed. By rendering a verdict of “not guilty,” jurors can stop the government from using the law as a weapon.

Even if the government had been able to meet its evidentiary burden in the sandwich case, @foxmike90.bsky.social argues, "the sheer absurdity of his prosecution made it ripe for jurors to simply say 'no.'” Jurors are "guardians against gov't oppression and bulwarks against prosecutorial overreach."

Hunter v. United States Brief: Unconstitutional Sentences Should Not Be Shielded from Appellate Review The Fifth Circuit’s decision welcomes prosecutors to bargain for sentences that courts cannot constitutionally impose. The Supreme Court should reverse.

Cato SCOTUS merits amicus in Hunter v. U.S., "joined by a cross-ideological coalition of civil rights and criminal reform groups... argues that unconstitutional sentences raise grave public concerns and should not be removed from judicial reviewability through plea bargaining." [Matt Cavedon]

It’s been quite something to watch the “presumption of liberty” guy trash his reputation and legacy just to piss on immigrants and prop up a corrupt and clownish autocrat.

Creating a military conflict with Venezuela gives this administration a legal "hook" to invoke the Alien Enemies Act. In other words, the foreign war is being manufactured in order to facilitate court deference for its domestic mass deportation policy. It's a Stephen Miller Special.

You know Thanksgiving weekend is getting a bit intense when the wife pursues you from the kitchen as you attempt to eat the last piece of chocolate cream pie, and to complete the task you have to barricade yourself in your office. 😎

Immigrants Used Less Welfare than Native-Born Americans in 2022 Rather than reaching toward expensive mass deportations as a solution to fiscal issues, the more free-market, libertarian, and fiscally responsible solution is to build a higher wall around the welfar...

From my Cato colleagues in February: "We find that all immigrants consumed 21 percent less welfare and entitlement benefits than native-born Americans on a per capita basis... Noncitizens were 7.3 percent of the population and consumed just 3.5 percent of all welfare and entitlement benefits."

Now Is Not the Time for Federal Judges to Be Removing ICE Skeptics from Jury Selection When the government acts aggressively, its agents lie, and the community witnesses the erosion of justice, that community’s informed distrust of the government’s actions is not a bias to be purged.

From my colleague @foxmike90.bsky.social: "Now is not the time for federal judges to be removing ICE skeptics from jury selection... [the] community’s informed distrust of the government’s actions is not a bias to be purged."