Legal AF Full Episode - 7/12/2025

20:38Michael Popok:So there you have it, Buck. Well, I was just going to say they picked up, forget about the pitchforks. They picked up pitchforks and torches and they're going after the monster. And the monster is now Donald Trump, who's so clueless that in that, I don't know if we're going to show the clip, but in that cabinet meeting he held three days ago, where he just rambled on about everything from the Texas flood disaster to redecorating the cabinet room with gold leaf. in the middle, he got asked a question about Epstein. And he said, where you did the great mimic imitation of him at the beginning, because they were really asking the question of Pam Bondi, who was next to him in that meeting.

21:15Michael Popok:She went off and tried to answer the questions not well. He said, why, because he tried to protect her, why are we even talking about Epstein? That's a desecration of like the memory of the little girls in Texas. They're like, oh, we're really pressing a losing hand here. And Trump obviously politically has a tremendous tin ear about his MAGA base that supports him. I'm actually, I know you followed it more than I did, but I'm actually shocked by the unanimity of MAGA and the conservative movement to without reflex, to take up arms against Donald Trump.

21:55Ben Meiselas:he didn't give them any out he usually gives them an out oh biden did this or this person did that or the sdn wise he just went hepstein why are we talking about it because he was guilty and he's always getting and and he law he he wasn't able to keep it going there and that's what happens with ponzi schemes you go to like a bernie madoff or an enron or whatever eventually it ends and and And the Trump-Honzie schemes end as well. I mean, historically, it's why so many of his businesses went bankrupt. He could drag all of the creditors along, along, along, along. And then finally, he always has a moment in his career when he's just like Epstein.

22:38Ben Meiselas:He's like, why would I pay you? And then, boom, it all blows up and it all falls apart. Do you think he appoints a special president? What's Stephen Miller telling him to do? It doesn't make a difference because Trump is not going to do a Trump is done talking about Epstein, but the people are. This story is going to get worse and worse for him. In his mind, he's done the cover up. He's not talking about it. He's now going to in his own mind. He's going to do what he did this morning. Rosie O'Donnell revoke her citizenship. And we're all supposed to go. Oh, my God, Donald Rosie O'Donnell. But it just directs our attention back.

23:17Ben Meiselas:Oh, got it. you're covering up for the Epstein list. I see what you're doing right there. Or all of these things that he's doing. Everything's a cover-up. I mean, this past week, I'm trying to think of all the cover-ups that I've recorded on.

23:29Michael Popok:I mean, just even think about this.

23:33Ben Meiselas:Donald Trump said in a press conference that all 14 ballistic missiles that were shot by Iran into the Al-Udid Air Force Base in Qatar were shot down. Not the case, one of the ballistic missiles actually hit a pretty significant asset of the United States is in that base, a geodesic radar dome that we use for confidential communications. They covered that up and we learn about that. Of course, they covered up the fact that the strikes in Iran were not as successful as they originally claimed. Now, Israeli intelligence says that Iran's able to get weapons grade material pretty much right away. They haven't now, right.

24:13Ben Meiselas:And then all of the coverups in Texas. I mean, what's happened in Kerr County and how Donald Trump goes there and says, we've done an excellent job. You can, he goes, you're an evil person or you are a loser if you question what the county, the state and the federal government could have been doing better in that, which is -

24:36Michael Popok:Wait, wait, wait, wait. As we have new reporting, that FEMA defunded and underfunded by Donald Trump. So it's his FEMA did not respond, was not responsive to people in need and distress in that county because and who's that? That's not Biden. That's the shrinking of the federal government so small it could be drowned in a bathtub, which is Donald Trump's goal. And so it's his FEMA. And that's his problem when he goes to places like that. If Biden had gone that late to that disaster area, days, almost a week after the floods, to walk around with Melania, this time she wasn't wearing a jacket that said, I don't care, do you?

25:18Michael Popok:He's wearing a black hat, though.

25:20Ben Meiselas:I mean, it looks ridiculous.

25:21Michael Popok:Yeah, right. Off the Elon Musk collection from Kmart. But when she goes there, he says, they say such weird and discordant things. Abbott, the governor, says it's like a football team. You don't talk about how you lost. Ma 'am, I'm going to do better next time. This is a football team? The loss of 250 plus Texans, including 20 little girls, that's a football team? And Donald Trump says, yeah, their love for that camp was cute. It was really cute. And Melania, I got a charm bracelet. Are Are you effing kidding me? In 1987, 10 other girls drowned in a bus along that same river. Okay. And in that amount of time, including the first Trump administration, and certainly now, nothing is done to establish a warning system.

26:10Michael Popok:And they let cabins, including the youngest girl cabins, to sit along that lake, that river that went up 24 feet in two hours and drowned them all. And so who is to blame? Are we in the Bible now? Do we just, this is just the Red Sea. We don't know how it happened. Come on.

26:29Ben Meiselas:It was a four minute walk for those girls to get to the safe distance. Four minutes. You know what they call that mountain there? God mountain, because all you got to do is pray. So that was God mountain. It took 72 hours for FEMA to activate urban search and rescue crews, not because it wasn't ready. FEMA had it ready, but because Kristi Noem wouldn't sign off on it and nobody has heard or seen the head of FEMA, this new guy, no one knows where he is. He wasn't at that meeting. He hasn't been in the press conferences. The head of FEMA is missing in action. Just think about if Biden's head of FEMA just ran away from something like this.

27:14Ben Meiselas:And this is the Trump regime. All right, We got to take our first quick break of the show. I want to remind everybody about Michael Popak's new law firm, where a lot of our audience is reaching out with their cases. So if you or somebody you know has been in a catastrophic injury, a trucking accident, a car accident, an auto accident, where you are the victim, if you know someone who's the victim and is in a wrongful death case, a medical malpractice case, a sexual harassment or assault case, go reach out to Michael Popak. The consultation is free. He started this firm because you all said, hey, we'd love to reach out to you.

27:49Ben Meiselas:We trust you. And we need, you know, if we have a case, can you do the cases? He couldn't. Now he could. Popak, where can they reach out to you?

27:56Michael Popok:So honored to represent the people in our audience and their family members. We made it easy. I made it easy. I designed it. It's an easy to remember 1-800 number for a free consultation, 1-877-POPAK. That's P-O-P-O-K-A-F. What else? and then a website that brings you right to a free consultation form with people standing by to evaluate your case. And that is at thepopocfirm.com.

28:24Ben Meiselas:Subscribe to the Legal AF YouTube channel. Let's get them to 1 million subscribers and the Legal AF sub stack as well. All right, let's take our first quick break of the show. We will be right back.

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31:24Ben Meiselas:Welcome back to Legal AF. Thank you to those pro-democracy sponsors. Support our sponsors by using those discount codes in the description below. The link to the sponsor is right there. We were talking about the Trump regime cover-ups. We saw another on full display in the federal courts across the United States as the United Nations investigation into El Salvador's role in disappearing human beings from the United States turned up some, we would call them a hot doc. We would call them smoking guns when I would practice law. And Michael Popak, this is a hot doc showing that the Trump regime engaged in the most contemptuous of behavior before the federal courts when it claimed it had no ability to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia or any of the migrants who were sent to CICOT, that concentration camp in El Salvador.

32:23Ben Meiselas:You see, what happened was the United Nations opened up an investigation into crimes against humanity by El Salvador, saying that you are aiding and abetting the United States into torturing and disappearing human beings. El Salvador relies a lot on tourism. And El Salvador, you know, I think was worried that the UN could reach a finding that could also impact. And this was one of the pressure points I always existed with El Salvador. You know, other countries not going to El Salvador. As Donald Trump loves to praise the dictator Bukele of El Salvador, El Salvador has a relatively pretty, pretty small, you know, GDP.

33:10Ben Meiselas:They're highly dependent on tourism. And, you know, if people stop showing up there and buying their products, it's very easy for Venezuela to go bankrupt pretty quickly. So the U.N. did an investigation and El Salvador responded to the United Nations. And here was the response from El Salvador in response to a United Nations missing persons report. So the report on just the fact that the UN is doing an investigation into involuntary disappearances of human beings by the United States and El Salvador to the UN distances itself from the United States. How do we know this? Well, we have the documents that they gave to El Salvador, sent to the UN, which became part of the discovery and the court filings in the federal court cases across the country.

34:04Ben Meiselas:It was first filed in that class action case in Washington, D.C., before Judge Boesburg regarding the 150-plus Venezuelans who were sent to Seacott. Then the other judges, whether it was Judge Zinnis, an Obama appointee in Maryland, or even Judge Gallagher, a Trump appointee, all these judges start taking on their own, sua sponte, judicial notice of this document and saying, all right, Trump regime, here's what El Salvador is telling the United Nations. So we're taking judicial notice that you basically lied to the court. So what did El Salvador say to the U.N.? Let me just read it. It says, the Salvadoran state emphatically states that its authorities have not arrested, detained, or transferred the persons referred to in the communications of the working group.

34:58Ben Meiselas:That's the involuntary disappearance group. The actions of the state of El Salvador have been limited to the implementation of a bilateral cooperation mechanism with another state, through which it has facilitated the use of the Salvadoran prison infrastructure for the custody of persons detained within the scope of the justice system and law enforcement of that other state. In this context, the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively with the competent foreign authorities by virtue of international agreements signed and in accordance with the principles of sovereignty and international cooperation in criminal matters.

35:41Ben Meiselas:Michael Popak, that U.N. report makes it clear. And that was from Bukele saying that, nope, all we're doing is providing temporary prison. But the jurisdiction over those prisoners is with Trump. That's what I do. Let me put it in plain English.

35:59Michael Popok:The Trump administration, the Department of Justice is effed. They have been lying to the federal judges. No, they've been lied. They've been lied to. We've got three different federal judges that have been lied to based on this new bombshell from the UN that was filed in Judge Bozberg chambers for the JGG case, about 200 people who are not named Brego Garcia, who he's trying to decide whether and how he should order them back, give them to process. He also had a series of discovery, which is information exchange, compelled information exchange in the process about two months ago about who really had custody of these individuals.

36:42Michael Popok:And the Department of Justice and ICE and Homeland Security and the Secretary of State all took the position, all took the position in order to support their Donald Trump has foreign policy privilege because the Supreme Court says he does in the area of foreign policy. So they had to make it about sovereignty and diplomatic negotiations. So they actually took the position in writing that they could not get somebody like Abrego Garcia out of or anybody out of the Seacott Supermax killer prison in El Salvador because that was a sovereign decision for Bukele. And in order to reinforce that, everybody remembers they brought Bukele into the White House, treated him better than our wartime ally Zelensky, this petty dictator.

37:33Michael Popok:And he said, why would I ever bring a murderer, a gang member, smuggle him into the United States? I would never do that. And Trump, I would never ask you to do that. So they had that bullshit pitch and catch for the press and the media. The reality is, based on this new, what was once secret but now is public, they now have admitted, El Salvador has admitted that for all time, everybody that's been dumped off in El Salvador, those 200 people, including Abrego Garcia, were always only under the custodial decision making of the United States of America. so that they have lied and suborned perjury, that's what we call it, in court after court after court, which is consistent with what the whistleblower, Erez Ruveni, who used to be one of the top immigration lawyers and appeared in front of Judge Zinnis in the Abrego Garcia case and worked for Drew Ensign, who floats around all of these cases, and he said in his 27 pages that he and others were told to not, We're told to defy federal judges from Zinnis to Gallagher to Bozberg, to not tell them the truth, to push ahead, to tell them to go F you.

38:54Michael Popok:And this reinforces that they have all been lied to. So here's the, this is like a, I feel like this is a pool, a perverse game of pool where the cue ball is now going to hit three different cases. OK, so that gets filed in the Boesburg case. So look for contempt proceedings from a judge that already found the Trump administration that there was probable cause for criminal contempt already. So we got that. Judge Gallagher believes that she's been lied to because both things can't be true. Either El Salvador lied to the UN, and nobody believes that, on the issue of who controls Seacott for the American deportees, or she's been lied to in her courtroom by the Department of Justice in the cases that she's dealing with because she has an Abrego Garcia-like person that she's ordered to have returned and to have everybody, to have him facilitated back to the United States.

39:57Michael Popok:and was fed the same load of crap by the Department of Justice as Judge Zinnis was in her case involving Abrego Garcia. Then you've got Abrego Garcia, which just had a two-day evidentiary hearing with all this as a backdrop, with a judge, Judge Zinnis, who believes in her heart of hearts, and you can tell from her body language, the things that she says and the things that she writes, she believes that she's been lied to frequently by an untrustworthy Department of Justice. She will not take anything they say as true. She even forced them to have an evidentiary hearing and put a witness in the box in her case where she's trying to decide what happens to Abrego Garcia after he's released potentially on the 16th of July by a federal magistrate judge in Tennessee about whether he is going to be brought back to Maryland which is what Abrego Garcia wants to have happen, to be under the watchful eye of Judge Zinnes.

40:59Michael Popok:And she wanted to get straight in a hearing, what are you planning to do, Trump ICE, Trump Homeland Security, with a guy named Abrego Garcia once he is released from federal detention, which where he's been stashed away by a federal magistrate judge to protect him from the Trump administration and from removal. originally, some people might be thinking, what happened to that? What happened to that indictment for human smuggling, Popak, in Tennessee? Yeah. What happened to that? We always knew it was a charade. It was manufactured. It was a lie. They are effectively abandoning the indictment. They are not going to go forward with it.

41:40Michael Popok:They did not say it when asked. She asked the lawyers of the Department of Justice, let me get this straight. Did you just indict him because you needed to do that in order to get him back from El Salvador? And now we know no, because they always had control of the prison. They said, no, judge. He said, all right, well, then you lied to me. Then you lied to me about your inability to bring him back. And you also, I have a lot of skepticism about a criminal investigation that got started while we were in court talking about Abrego Garcia. And then she said, well, what is your grounds to take him into immigration process and to remove him.

42:17Michael Popok:Well, we have an order of detainer. She says, what's the order of detainer? Just for our audience, the federal magistrate, the federal marshals who are holding him in the detention center related to his criminal case have been informed by ICE that they have an order of detainer, meaning when he pops out of that detention center. He's going to be rearrested and detained by ICE because of their removal process. And she said, what's the basis for that? They said a final order of removal. She said, you just gave me a witness who said the decision about a final order for removal hasn't been determined and won't be until he actually gets into ICE custody.

42:58Michael Popok:So which is it? Then they told her, Ben, you'll love this. They told her at one point, she says, well, I want to see a copy of the detainer. They said, well, we don't have it. She said, well, you didn't bring it to court during our evidentiary hearing? Trust this judge. It's a standard order of detainer. She said, frankly, I don't trust you. You don't have credibility with me in this courtroom for obvious reasons. And so she is about to make a ruling with, again, this backdrop of the Trump administration, Homeland Security, Secretary of State, and ICE have lied to three federal judges about their control over that prison.

43:33Michael Popok:She's now going to make a decision. And based on what I read about the two days of hearing and the Trump administration basically going, telling Judge Sinis to go F herself by putting a witness in the box that she ordered, she said, give me a witness with personal knowledge or he gets up to speed on the facts about exactly the next steps for Abrego Garcia for his removal, whether he's going to a third country, how is he doing it, the amount of time the lawyers will have to run into court to talk about it on a writ of habeas corpus. Give me the process. The guy gets in the box, four hours, he's in the box, witness box.

44:12Michael Popok:He's some deputy muckety-muck guy who's been with ICE for like 14 years. And the first question was, when were you identified as a witness in this case? Four o 'clock in the morning, my time, three days ago. Okay. Did you have any involvement in this Abrego Garcia case before that? None. Do you have any experience in this type of removal? I don't. Did you, do you know what's going to, this is the fundamental question. Do you know what's going to happen to Abrego Garcia if he's released and turned over to ICE custody? We haven't made that decision yet. The judge said, let me take some questioning here.

44:48Michael Popok:Are you want me to believe that a desk clerk is going to make this decision about Abrego Garcia, the guy that has the United States Supreme Court, 9-0 decision in his favor. That's what you want me to believe? And then the lawyers for Abrego Garcia asked, I mean, these questions were not hard. How were you prepared to testify today? I was given a one and a half page memo, like, okay, go on. And I was prepared by Department of Justice lawyers for three hours. That's it? That's it. Did you ever think to talk to anybody that actually had personal knowledge in any of the departments of the government about Abrego Garcia?

45:26Michael Popok:No, that never occurred to me to talk to those people. So they took a weekend at Bernie's guy who has no experience about anything to answer any of the judge's questions. And now they're going to, I guess they'll be shocked when Judge Zinnis is, I'll come back and tell you I was wrong. She's going to enter a temporary restraining order. She's going to bring him to Maryland under her watchful eye. She is going to give 48 to 72 hours notice before he is removed and put on a plane to Mexico or wherever they're going to send him to let the lawyers come back to her and argue about his due process rights.

46:01Michael Popok:And what we're watching, just to kind of take the plane up for a moment, is we're watching, and we'll talk about it throughout Legal AF today, judges, politicians, individuals coming at the Trump administration to shove back at the repulsion depraved policies that have sunk the Trump administration in a way I don't even think he envisioned in terms of polling. He is 26 points underwater in terms of favorable, unfavorable, unfavorable. He's the lowest rated president in 50 years since polling at the six-month mark. And everybody that watches Midas Touch Network and Legal AF and sees children in cages and handcuffs, sees people dying during raids, sees human beings being chased on horseback through parks, through farms, through factories.

46:54Michael Popok:It's one thing to read about an executive order. It's another thing to see a child in chains and a van being brought down a freeway. Well, I have the B-roll.

47:05Ben Meiselas:Salty, can you play the B-roll, LA, in ice? For our audio listeners, as our viewers can see it. These are children between the ages of five and 12 in handcuffs at an ICE detention center in Los Angeles, walking in a line together, hands shackled as they're being moved to their next location. We don't have the audio here because I asked for it to be done as B-roll, but it's someone just kind of cursing at the ICE guards as the ICE guards are walking handcuffed children, single file in a garage who are chained. You know, we have a concentration camp in Florida, in the Everglades, that they call Alligator Alcatraz, which is really Alligator Dachau or Alligator whatever you want to call it.

48:00Ben Meiselas:I mean, it's a concentration camp there. Outposts, right. Yeah, you know, Dachau was the first one before it got, you know, And so I think it's a concentration camp. I think it's getting there. But the first one in Nazi Germany was, and I hope I'm pronouncing you right, Dachau or Dachau. Dachau. It was the first one. And to me, that's the better representation of what alligator kind of Alcatraz is for now. And that's why we, the people, have to take back the power. It's certainly not going to come from the United States Supreme Court. Although I will give a hat tip, though. The district court judges, Trump-appointed judges, George W.

48:41Ben Meiselas:Bush, Reagan, Obama, and Biden, they're doing their job at the district court level, I would say, by and large.

48:48Michael Popok:And appellate court generally.

48:50Ben Meiselas:And appellate courts are doing their job. Then it gets to those Supreme Court justices. And what they do procedurally is to try to wash their hands of the cruelty they're inflicting. They use a shadow docket, and then they grant the Trump administration's procedural request to stay or pause the district court's order to preserve the status quo pending the resolution of the cases. And oftentimes, the district court will preserve the status quo before Trump did all the illegal stuff. So the district court stays from Trump judges, Obama judges, Reagan judges, whoever. They'll say, no, no, no. Preserve the pre-Trump status quo.

49:38Ben Meiselas:Right. And then after that, you would have then after that, you would have the Supreme Court steps in and says, nope, we want to basically have it be the status quo once Trump implemented the law and or when Trump did his executive order, which is the clearly patently unlawful executive order. All right. I want to take our last quick break of the show when we get back. I want to talk about more on what we were saying here, a new ruling from a federal judge in the Central District of California, specifically finding that the Trump regime is engaging in racial profiling and ordering them to stop doing it without probable cause.

50:20Ben Meiselas:And then let's talk a little bit more, Popak, wearing our legal caps from negligence and malpractice and how you would handle this case if you were a lawyer dealing with the situation in Texas and what the kind of legal rights are of the people in Texas. We touched on it before, but I want to hear about that as well. I want to remind everybody about the Legal AF Substack. Make sure you subscribe there on Legal AF. If you have Substack, search Legal AF. Also, the Legal AF YouTube channel, subscribe to that. They're on their way to a million subscribers on the Legal AF YouTube channel. And if you have a case or you know somebody who has a legal case, if you were involved in an auto accident, a trucking accident, you're the victim, and you suffered serious injuries and you want a free consultation, reach out to Michael Popak's firm.

51:18Ben Meiselas:Also, if you know someone who was involved in a wrongful death case, sexual assault and harassment case, legal malpractice, medical malpractice cases, Popak, where can they reach out to you if they want a free consultation about their injury?

51:29Michael Popok:I designed a very simple process, 1-800 number that I could remember, 1-877-POPOC-AF, and a website that is deceptively easy to remember, thepopocfirm.com. There are human beings on both ends of that inquiry method, whatever suits whatever you like better, that will do a screening about the case as it gets to me.

52:00Ben Meiselas:Let's take our last quick break of the show, and then we'll be right back.

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54:43Ben Meiselas:Welcome back to Legal AF. Thank you to our pro-democracy sponsors. You know, Popak, all hell was breaking loose in California over the past few days, frankly, for a while as ICE dressed in their military gear, bringing their tanks, invading our neighborhoods. You know, they started off earlier in the week going through MacArthur Park and kind of storming a park where kids were playing soccer in Los Angeles County. And then ICE began its raids of farms in Santa Barbara County, in Ventura County, all throughout Fresno County, Riverside, and causing a lot of chaos, rounding people up if they looked Hispanic, you know, whether they were American citizens or not, just rounding people up.

55:34Ben Meiselas:I mean, we've heard stories about a disabled veteran who was at the Camarillo farmhouse plant, a glasshouse plant that was used for cannabis farming, was a security guard there. And he was leaving. He was rounded up by ICE. We're talking about an American citizen.

55:54Michael Popok:There's an American citizen, Joe Garcia, who just filed a multimillion dollar lawsuit in L.A. with a video. It's up on Instagram. about him being pulled, he's an American citizen, being pulled out of the cab of his truck by ICE, who racial profiled him. And because he looked a certain way and spoke a certain way and hung out in a certain place, they use that as probable cause to violate his Fourth Amendment rights of search and seizure. And he's not taking it lying down. He's the first lawsuit that's been brought by an American citizen for the violation of his constitutional rights by this administration and their deportation and removal plan.

56:40Michael Popok:Things are going to happen like this, right, Ben? When you have a$3 ,000 a day quota for arrests being pushed by Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, and you have an ICE group that's morale is so in the trash that part of the budget that just got passed was to give them a$10 ,000 bonus to stay because nobody wants to be there. They're calling it internally at ICE, mission impossible. They hate their job. This is not what they signed up for. When you put that together in one place, being pushed by depraved people like Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, bad things happen. We're there to report on it so that people see.

57:18Michael Popok:It's one thing, like I said earlier, it's one thing to read about it or to read an executive order of Donald Trump. It is another thing for the repulsiveness. And this is where the polling is. Donald Trump is getting whipsawed between his immigration policies, which people are now seeing in the flesh, as human beings are being chased and children are being chased on horseback and thrown in the back and vans chained together, with this Epstein story that it just is like a bad penny for Donald Trump. It just won't go away. The more he wills it to go away, the worse it is for him. And he's getting whipsawed between these two things while he F's with the global economy with his tariff policies.

58:02Ben Meiselas:So let's talk about this order out of the Central District of California, an injunction against the Trump regime and ICE from racially profiling people. The ACLU put in so many alarming facts about what was taking place out here. And we know it's taking place. I mean, just if you look Hispanic, you know, they the ICE would roll up at the swap meets. They don't care if you're an American citizen or not, or a migrant, they run up to you, they grab you, and they throw you in the car, and they bring you away. And then they ask questions later. Maybe they release you. Maybe they don't. Maybe you end up wherever.

58:37Ben Meiselas:I mean, there's still a lot of people who are missing. Where are these people? In LA, there are signs missing. Where is this person? Like in the United States. So, Popak, talk about this district court order.

58:50Michael Popok:Yeah, we've got a great district court order out of your neck of the woods, Central District of California. So Judge Frimpong, who's a Biden appointee, she made it relatively simple. She said, this is not a difficult case. regardless of whether you want to try to deport and remove migrants and undocumented, they have Fourth Amendment search and seizure rights, and they have Fifth Amendment rights to counsel if they've been detained, and you are violating both of them. In her 52-page opinion, she recites the facts that were put in by the ACLU about what's happening, and she said, you are enjoined from doing the following.

59:36Michael Popok:You cannot base your stop and detain and arrest based on the accent that they have, the language that they speak, what they look like, what their last name is, where they work, where they are hanging out or hanging around. You can't do any racial or immigrant profiling in order to violate the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment is not, yes, it's for American citizens, but it's for everyone on American soil. And they are, because of this widespread search and seizure that they're using, they're not being careful at all about how they filter out the good from the bad. In fact, you have spokespeople for the Trump administration that says another district judge is undermining the will of the American people.

1:00:38Michael Popok:Thanks, Tricia McLaughlin. Why don't you look at your polling? The will of the American people is that 68 % think your immigration plans are terrible and depraved, and they believe there should be a path to citizenship, and they don't believe in removal. They also love throwing or They love pushing these buttons, knowing that they are false. The button of we're getting rapists, murderers, pedophiles off the street, meaning if we if we talk about this and criticize their violation of the Fourth Amendment, we must be pro murder, pro rape and pro pedophilia. And the reality is that's not what the numbers show.

1:01:16Michael Popok:More than 50 % of the people that are being picked up and stopped and arrested don't have a criminal record at all. And they are not getting MS-13 off the street. So that is a complete and total fabrication of the Trump administration. and they say that outside the courtroom. But why they lose is because they have no evidence of that in the courtroom. And so they lose time and time again at every federal judge, at every trial judge level and appellate court level. We'll set aside for a moment for now what happens at the Supreme Court issue. So Frimpong took a look at all the facts and she's issued.

1:01:59Michael Popok:It's not a nationwide injunction. We've done a great tutorial about why it's not a nationwide injunction. It applies to Central District of California, but it will have, as the ACLU has said in their press releases, it will have a ripple effect, a domino effect as a blueprint for how other judges will address this very issue. Eventually, there's going to, we're going to talk about a class certification today. There's going to be a class certification of everybody who's being racially or otherwise profiled in the violation of the Fourth Amendment and not given access to counsel in violation of the Fifth Amendment.

1:02:35Michael Popok:She actually issued two temporary restraining orders. Some of the reporting was like it was one, it's two. It's one on the Fourth Amendment and the other on the Fifth Amendment. At the very same time she's doing that, that guy, Job Garcia, filed his multimillion-dollar lawsuit because he is an American citizen who was racially profiled and pulled out of the cab of his truck and roughed up by ICE, backed up by National Guard. It's another reason you don't want to have the federalization of the National Guard, because all you're seeing then is the military involved with the violation of Americans and others' Fourth Amendment rights, which is exactly where an apolitical military does not want to be.

1:03:18Ben Meiselas:You know, one of the things you talked about this injunction as it relates to Southern California, it's limited this order by Judge Fringpong to Central District of California in this area. injunctions like this will be granted. The broader issue, Popak, as you mentioned, these civil lawsuits that civil rights lawyers that people like you would ultimately file, what's going to become a major issue is going to be the issue of Bivens, right? This case that was decided in 1971, Bivens versus six unnamed agents. And this case found in that specific case, there was an implied cause of action for an individual whose Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizures had been violated by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

1:04:11Ben Meiselas:But over the years, as this implied cause of action has been tried to be extended to ICE and other groups, the Supreme Court has largely found that because Congress has not passed a law that specifically says you can sue ICE for unreasonable search and seizures, that you can't bring civil lawsuits against ICE. People may remember some of the early days of Legal AF. You and I covered the Bivens case, and one of the contexts where we covered it was actually a lawsuit brought by Michael Cohen against the Department of Justice and others when he showed up for a probation hearing and they wanted him to sign away his rights to do a book.

1:04:57Ben Meiselas:And he goes, I'm not signing it. They put him in solitary confinement and he sues and says, you violated, that was an unreasonable search and seizure. You violated my constitutional rights. And the Supreme Court wouldn't take the case. And ultimately the second circuit following Supreme Court precedent said Bivens had not been extended to these other areas. So I flag that now because, Popak, I think that's where I think we're going to have an issue where these cases potentially get dismissed against ICE under Bivens for the horrific conduct that they do. And then we're going to have to then see what's going to happen with the Bivens doctrine.

1:05:38Ben Meiselas:But unlike Trump, who has the Supreme Court on speed dial. I think a lot of these lawsuits against ICE, unfortunately, are going to take many years after I think, unfortunately, they may get dismissed until it gets brought to the Supreme Court. And I actually think the Supreme Court, I'm not trying to give bad news here. I think the Supreme Court is going to kind of let ICE do whatever it wants. You disagree with me, Popak, on the Bivens analysis there?

1:06:04Michael Popok:No, the reason I raise, I don't. And the reason I raise Job is not because I think he'll ultimately be successful, although I looked at the complaint briefly before I was doing a hot take. They have a workaround for it, but Bivens, this MAGA Supreme Court, if Bivens isn't on life support, it's pretty close. They just don't like when Congress hasn't spoken expressly on an issue, they just don't like to find liability, especially when it undermines their imperial presidency model, which we're watching over and over and over again. I mean, I was even surprised that they found back to Ron DeSantis for a minute.

1:06:47Michael Popok:Ron DeSantis and his attorney general, the guy that came up with the Alcatraz, Alligator Alcatraz, had a setback because the Supreme Court, even they thought that Ron DeSantis is out there to try to criminalize immigration by state law in Florida. And they were like, yeah, no, you can't do that. So I was like, well, we found the limits of what the Supreme Court is willing to back you up on when you have depraved immigration policies. But I agree with you. But the purpose of talking about it, this is where you and I, I think, do a good job in the way we present to our audience, is not the defeatist, you know, he did it, but he's going to lose.

1:07:26Michael Popok:We're not the Grim Reaper. There is merit and there is purpose and there is a learning that happens and a need to file these things, even if we can astral project into what's going to happen two or three years from now. We need to bring the thousands, thousands of lawsuits. I said 4 ,000. I think I'm going to be right by the end of the term against the Trump administration and let the trial court level judges, even if they're not going to be ultimately supported on every issue by the United States Supreme Court, do their jobs. Most justice is done at the trial level and at the appellate court level and not at the United States Supreme Court level.

1:08:09Michael Popok:There are tens of thousands of cases that are filed every year. Only 70 make it on to the big docket for the Supreme Court. They have other emergency applications and things that bulk up those numbers. But that's where justice is done. And we have to continue to just keep firing at the strike zone with these cases, whether it's done by private parties, by the states, by the public interest groups, by the new public interest groups that we never even heard of, you know, 10 years ago or a year ago that have popped up now to defend people who are being retaliated against by this vindictive president.

1:08:49Michael Popok:It's just mind-boggling to me that we talk about the immolation of the Republican Party and the MAGA Party, which is one and the same at this point at the top of the podcast. It's still remarkable to me, having always had for my adult life a other party that I could reasonably disagree with on most policy issues, but I could still consider a party on the other side. And now to see the numbers of the people who in the MAGA and Republican movement who think Trump is doing a good job and the numbers there. Now, fortunately, the rest of America, including all of the independents at this point, have totally abandoned him and have left the building, which is why his numbers are terrible.

1:09:39Michael Popok:But to see that the Republicans and even like the country club Republicans and the ones that were the Goldwater Reagan Republicans are still somehow supporting him is mind boggling to me. They're there. They've so overplayed their hand in shoving this agenda down our throats and up our other body parts over the last six months that I can't believe they're going to be shocked when the American people send them packing, at least the House and likely the Senate, at the midterms. I just I think their goal is to do maximum damage and destruction with a short time horizon that Trump has for many reasons and to and to check the box of as many debts as he has to pay off to all the groups that got him elected.

1:10:30Michael Popok:And then after that, it's up for us, for you and I and the rest of America to pick up the pieces.

1:10:35Ben Meiselas:I want to briefly address how I and you would approach a legal case in Texas. and how we would kind of look at it. Not practicing in Texas, but I handled a lot of cases against, when I did practice, the county and city in Los Angeles. You know, that involved dangerous conditions. I once handled a very tragic case involving a father and a young girl. The father lost his life saving the young girl. There was supposed to be a stop sign at an intersection and a car that would roll through this dangerous intersection, hit the father. And one of the things that we uncovered in Discovery is that there was supposed to be a stop sign there.

1:11:19Ben Meiselas:And what happened was the person in charge of it was actually deployed overseas, and they just literally forgot to put the person to install the stop sign afterwards. And so that person left. Two years passed. We got the emails in Discovery, and there was literally an email where someone was like, oh, shit, we forgot the stop sign. And after that, they had to settle that case. That was a more complicated case, I think, than this. I mean, in terms of the duty, breach of duty, causation and damages, that would be your analysis for negligence here. I think it was even more than negligence. I think that this was a recklessness and a maliciousness bordering on, you know, the most significant to punitive damages.

1:12:04Ben Meiselas:But, Popak, you have this camp that's built in an area where already it should not be built. It should not be built in a flood corridor where you know that that this is the most dangerous river that one of the most dangerous rivers that exist. You know, then at the county and city level, they took the money that Biden gave him in the American Recovery Act, like$10 million, that was supposed to go to alarm and warning systems, and they took it to give themselves bonuses and to pay themselves more money instead of do what they were supposed to do because they said warning system was communist and woke.

1:12:44Ben Meiselas:There's actually transcripts from the county hearings where, and by the way, the people in the county would say, yeah, we don't want that woke stuff. And then the judges who lead that kind of like, yeah, but we'll just take the money for ourselves. What are we going to, let's consult John Cornyn, the lawyer, the senator from Texas. And then Cornyn told them, yeah, just take the money or whatever. So you have all of that. You have the county not activating. They still had access to do a cell phone warning. They did not activate that. We know that we know that that at the federal level that they didn't do the urban search and rescue for seven.

1:13:25Michael Popok:They were on notice and they were on notice since 1987 when those 10 girls died in the bus in the same region from a flood because the river rose at that time.

1:13:36Ben Meiselas:to me i believe there's going to be lots of lawsuits that are going to be filed over this i think it's just a matter of time what do you think popock well i totally agree with you

1:13:46Michael Popok:it's fine you know it's not funny you and i have a very similar uh practice i had a very similar case where where um about a a child who was impaled off of a guardrail uh and the screw-ups that were related to that. It is harder to sue a state and a municipality and a government entity because of some aspects of sovereign immunity, but not impossible. You have to go through that process. A lot of states will then require you to go to the legislature and get what's called a special claims bill. That's what we had to do in Florida in order to compensate for that. But usually there's so much public pressure related to these cases where these horrific things have happened.

1:14:26Michael Popok:Like, we left out one terrible fact. Not only were the cabins at that camp, and hundreds of other people died. I don't only want to focus on the little girls at a Christian camp who died, but the fact that they allowed the youngest girls who were eight were at the cabin that was closest to the river, and the older girls were up on that, whatever you called it, Holy Hill or whatever it was. So they were actually, in a perverse way, destined, doomed to die if that river rose as quickly as it did the youngest, which is just sad in so many different ways. And then hundreds, and we've all seen the pictures now, we've read the stories of people leaving text messages and voicemail messages for their loved ones with the water rising in the background before them.

1:15:22Michael Popok:And this was very, very simple. This isn't woke. This isn't DEI. This is health and public safety, life, health, and safety, which is the only reason, and I have a fair amount of municipal government experience, this is the only reason that government exists is supposed to fundamentally be able to protect life, health, and safety of its residents. If it can't do that fundamental thing, it should be disbanded and the state should take it over. Except in Texas, I don't think that helps you because I think the state is also equally backwards when it comes to protecting people. So it's simple. You live in a river area.

1:16:01Michael Popok:You live on a fault line for an earthquake. you live in an area like in Florida that has hurricanes and you don't have things that help your people in time of distress, then you are negligent or reckless or criminally negligent if the things that you just identified come out in the lawsuit, which obviously they would, about we'll take the money and we, you know, F Biden, you know, let's go Brandon, who cares? and then here's the ramifications of it. This was a simple fix. They did not, this is the sad part. We watched what happened in New Orleans with the wipeout of the parishes in New Orleans, mainly black parishes in New Orleans, and things that were done after that to avoid the death and destruction that happened after Hurricane Katrina.

1:16:54Michael Popok:That got taken seriously. Texas, it's been 40 years since those other little girls died about the same thing. And so that's why I think you're right. It rises to the level of recklessness. So you file the lawsuit. I'm sure it's coming. You file the lawsuit against everybody that has responsibility from the state to the federal to the local, to the camp, sorry, camp, and I know that one of the owners died, but there's stacks of insurance that go along with this. Listen, I was tangentially involved with the collapse of that tower in Florida. And over a billion dollars, you know, hundreds of people died in that collapse of that condo on the beach in Florida, in Miami Beach.

1:17:48Michael Popok:and billions of dollars were collected in insurance and paid out to the families related to that. And so that was a private entity, but there were county liability. There was state inspection liability. There was a lot of finger pointing. More importantly, there was a lot of insurance that goes around that. And then if it comes down to sovereign immunity and they want to stand up and say, you can't sue us because we're sovereign, then let's see what happens at the polls and with the legislature who, who would be able to waive sovereign immunity under those circumstances and give those, those 300 families or whatever it is, the, you'll never get back what they lost the people, the loved ones, the grandparents, the parents, the children.

1:18:35Michael Popok:No, but to give them some solace, something to compensate them in some small way for their loss.

1:18:45Ben Meiselas:Michael Popak. I agree with you. Thanks for that analysis. Everybody subscribe to Michael Popak's YouTube channel, the Legal AF YouTube channel. Subscribe now. Also, if you have a case, whether you were involved in an auto accident, trucking accident, employment case, medical malpractice, sexual assault, harassment, if you know someone who's been injured or was in a wrongful death situation where they died as a result of the negligence, reach out to Michael Popak's firm. He started it because our viewers wanted it and said, hey, can you handle our cases? So we started a firm to handle the cases.

1:19:24Ben Meiselas:Popak, where can they find you?

1:19:27Michael Popok:1877-POPAKAF gets you to live human beings that will walk you through a process to evaluate your case. Or if you want to skip that and kind of start with a free consultation form, you can go and learn more about the firm and the things that we cover through a nationwide top flight plaintiffs lawyers that I work in collaboration with. We're all really top flight in their jurisdictions because you need local lawyers that know what they're doing in these different courthouses. You can also go to www.thepopockfirm.com.

1:20:04Ben Meiselas:There he is, Michael Popak. Subscribe also to his sub stack. Subscribe to the Legal AF YouTube. Subscribe to it all. Subscribe to the Midas Touch YouTube channel as well. Thanks, Popak. Thanks, Legal AFers. Comprehensive episode. We will touch base next time on Legal AF. Have a great rest.

1:20:36Ben Meiselas:We'll see you next time.

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