The fine is $998 per day for “willfully” failing to depart after a final order of removal. $3,000 for failing to depart after voluntarily agreeing to do so, per incident. $250 for entering the United States not at a port of entry (increased to $5,130 after 4 July, 2025).

The per-day fines accrue to a limit of $1.8 million per individual.

The $998 per day fine was part of the 1996 immigration reform package. Previous administrations didn’t bother with it too much, because how the heck are going to collect the money from people you’ve already deported to foreign country? And how will people pay you hundreds of thousands if they’re already poor and broke?

This administration doesn’t care about the practical limits of collection, and I suspect they don’t care too much about proving the “willfully” part of it either.

Who needs most of the Pacific fleet anyway?

And if you live in Texas, don’t rely on DPS to process your voter registration through the driver license system. File an application directly with your county registrar.

There’s a provision in the law where they can’t do any mass purges within 90 days of an election. So this ruling is limited to “individualized queries” for the rest of the 2026 cycle. But you can expect it to be a much bigger deal in the 2028 cycle if it doesn’t get overturned.

(This is a situation where Congress has the power to change the law. Hint, hint.)

Update: the hearing on the proposed restraining order is scheduled for Wednesday afternoon.

Something to keep in mind is that the lawsuit to reverse this has already been filed, and it seems like a solid winner on first amendment viewpoint discrimination grounds. I think it’s likely an injunction will come down pretty fast to restore the credentials.

A few points here:

• Fox News is a cable channel, so it isn’t subject to this rule. The rule only applies over the air.
• Fox News argued in a legal case that one of its talk shows (I think Tucker Carlson) was not news and no one should believe it. I don’t think they were talking about their actual news programs on Fox News.
• The current FCC of this president is arguing that Kimmel is not a news program. Previous FCCs took the opposite view.

The Equal Time Rule would require Kimmel to offer to air an equal-time interview to Ken Paxton as well as Talarico. Unless Kimmel’s program is a bona fide news program, which would be exempt from the rule.

Previous administrations adopted a more broad interpretation of “bona fide news program” that included these late night shows that interview guests. Mainly because this rule and the exception are playing with legal fire regarding the first amendment and core political speech.

The Equal Time Rule applies only to over the air broadcasts. YouTube is unregulated on that point.

ICE spokesperson Jason Chudy said the agency arrested Javar because he allegedly failed to disclose a criminal conviction when applying for his immigrant visa in 1995. Chudy declared that Javar was “therefore ineligible to remain in the United States now.”

This is the kind of stuff that previous administrations overlooked and used their discretion on. This administration is mainly applying the immigration law strictly according to the letter. The immigration laws themselves really suck and they have for a long time.

It is his job to have the final say, after the lower appeals courts have had their final say. That hasn’t happened yet. This case is still being litigated in the district court.

That’s why Roberts said “likely unlawful.” Because the only question under consideration right now is which way to go until the lawsuit ends. The standard for that is “likely (un)lawful” because you can’t decide if it’s lawful until you decide if it’s lawful. (If that makes any sense).

The US beef supply is squeezed because some big droughts from a couple of years ago forced ranchers to sell off a lot of their herds.

Now, they don’t have the herds to supply the demand, and you can’t just magick more cows into existence. Once the problem exists, it takes a bunch of time to grow calves into cows.

The problem is exacerbated by a dynamic where the current high prices encourage ranchers to sell their cattle instead of keeping them around to grow the herd.

This month, the government responded to Streever’s lawsuit, confirming his allegations while attempting to rebut them.

My God, these DOJ lawyers are bad these days.

Yeah. This is about Trump’s motion to reconsider at the supreme court. The court already denied his petition, but he gets one more “pretty please change your mind” motion. This is the very end of the line for the $5 million case.

The supreme court is still considering whether to take up Trump’s petition in the $83 million case.

ICE is doing this now. They get information from TSA on who is going to be at what airports, and at which dates and times. That lets ICE make their arrest quotas with relatively low effort on their end.

If you have any kind of not completely regular immigration status, I would urge you to avoid domestic air travel in the United States right now.

People have been arrested at airports for overstayed visas, when they filed an adjustment of status on time, and the application has just been sitting at USCIS for several years.

So basically, Elon Musk was never the official Administrator of DOGE. It was this different woman that no one has heard of or seen.

On paper Elon Musk was only ever a “Special Government Employee”. This is an advisory or consultant type position that normally comes with no salary. It allows the politicians and political appointees to bring in their old friends from outside government, so they can talk to them. And meanwhile the friends get badges and credentials and email accounts so they can function in the office. But the bottom line is that SGE only ever has advisory power; no real power.

So that’s why Musk is not named on a lot of these suits. Anna Bower spent a lot of time trying to figure it out.

Here’s the plan for how the SAVE Act is intended to work:

1. SAVE Act requires voter ID, but it actually requires a photo ID that says “US citizen” on the ID.
2. For most people, the only identity documents that do that are passport books and passport cards.
3. Bad news: By and large, Americans don’t have passports. Passport adoption is really low compared to Europe.
4. Suddenly a bunch of Americans have to apply for passports to vote. Many will have trouble gathering the required documents, including birth certificates and marriage licenses (for name changes). Many won’t get it done in time.
5. What a disaster! So many people can’t vote!
6. But wait! SAVE Act comes in with a solution! States can be exempted from the ID bullshit.
7. But there’s a catch! To get the exemption, your state must have been turning over its voter rolls to the feds, quarterly, since July, 2025.
8. If your state, like every, uh, blue state, hasn’t been doing that… Well, I guess it just sucks to suck. There’s no way to become compliant now, and the SAVE Act hasn’t even been enacted yet.

Which is really strange, because the voter rolls are public information in every state of the Union. You can just buy them, and many political action groups do.

Technically, the war was “off” during that time, to avoid busting the 60 day limit without explicit Congressional authorization. We’re now in a completely new “second war,” by the way. So the 60 day clock has obviously restarted, duh.

Anyhow, those casualties couldn’t possibly have been war casualties, because we were dodging the war status for legal reasons.

You might beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride.

The money should be held by the court in an appeal bond. Hopefully she doesn’t have to try to extract it from Trump directly.