Welcome to Court Watch #181. We’ll get to the weekly roundup below, but first, let’s get Kafkaesque. Long time, or let’s be honest, even short-term readers of Court Watch may know that we have a healthy disdain for the current state of the public’s ability to access federal court records. In recent weeks, we’ve lamented about the hoops the public has to jump through just to read court records and highlighted a nationwide movement to unlock thousands of dockets. You may also recall that at the beginning of May, we wondered out loud whether law enforcement had, by way of interagency confusion or change in facts, may have been about to release a man from ICE detention who the government previously tagged as a “known or suspected terrorist.” Two weeks later, we had an answer.
But, because it was a habeas case, we only had a small glimpse into the docket. In order to get the full picture, we would have to travel to El Paso, Texas. And while we appreciate any location that is the purported birthplace of the margarita, the idea of taking two flights and a day of travel to pick up documents that are public but only available at a courthouse seemed a bit much. Also, the costs associated with such travel would be more than our small news organization can bear. So we needed a hero. Enter Christopher Beall, a lawyer who, among other things, specializes in First Amendment cases. He also happens to be a long-time Court Watch subscriber. He reached out and offered his pro bono services to file a motion to allow for public remote access to the docket. Given that Beal has a history of winning cases for us, we jumped on the opportunity.
In our 18-page motion to unrestrict the docket, we noted that “In particular, the Order of Immediate Removal (Doc #19, May 13, 2026) indicates that the Government had designated petitioner as a ‘Known Suspected Terrorist’ and had listed his removal matter as ‘High-Profile Removal.’ (Doc. #19 at 2.) These designations demonstrate a heightened interest in the petitioner’s case, and they underscore the need for full, unrestricted public access to the court file.”
The judge agreed with us and ordered the documents to be available online. We didn’t think we should have to hire a lawyer and file a motion to get access to documents that were already public, but you play the cards you’re given in the federal courts.
We reviewed the newly unrestricted documents, and to be honest, they don’t really rise to the level of another standalone story. That should have been that. Our readers get a sense of the labor-intensive exercise it takes to even evaluate whether something is newsworthy. We were content to move onto other reporting. But alas the story wouldn’t end there. Shortly after filing the judge’s order, the Justice Department filed a motion to reconsider the decision. We were keen to respond to their arguments in our own new motion, but pending the reconsideration, the docket was locked again. As such, and we can’t believe this is a sentence we have to write: We didn’t have access to the DOJ filing on the docket responding to our own filing.
If this all seems ridiculous, it’s because it is.
So off Beall went to write a late Wednesday motion to respond to a motion we couldn’t read. In our response motion, we noted in a footnote that “Court Watch can only say that it ‘appears’ the Government has filed a motion for reconsideration solely because the PACER docket for this case says so. No such motion has been served on undersigned counsel for Court Watch, nor is the motion itself accessible on PACER. Indeed, the Notice of Electronic Filing for the Government’s filing of this motion shows that it was sent only to counsel for the Respondents through the ECF-CM e-filing system, and not to counsel for Court Watch.”
Based on previous communication with the clerk, we had reason to believe that the DOJ filing would raise concerns that we didn’t alert the original petitioner to our motion to unrestrict. But DOJ’s own filings say they couldn’t reach the petitioner themselves. Writing in our new motion, we noted that “any argument by the Government that Court Watch’s motion should be held in abeyance until the Petitioner is given an opportunity to respond is an exercise of Kafkaesque futility because the Government itself has already confirmed to the Court that it too has no ability to communicate with Petitioner. In the Government’s filing on May 20, 2026, the Government informed the Court that the phone number it has for Petitioner “was not valid, and the call would not go through.” (Doc. #22.) Thus, the Government already knows that it is not possible to confer with Petitioner regarding issues in this case.”
On Thursday morning, DOJ finally sent us a copy of their motion. In it, they do raise the concern about alerting the petitioner. They also raise concerns about the potential for ‘doxxing’ government officials because the names of officials deciding the petitioner’s release would be available in the filings, an argument that was never previously raised by them when we filed originally. Again, these government documents were never filed under seal. They were not even filed in any redacted form. They are currently available to the public at the courthouse and have been for the last two months. We assure you, you don’t hate the state of public access to the courts enough. The Justice Department’s motion and our motion are pending before a judge.
And with that, let’s dive into the rest of the dockets this week.
Docket Roundup
Since you got through that long wonky lede, you deserve a scoop. A Puerto Rican man, Robinson De La Cruz Hilario, created a “tactical map” to commit a mass shooting at a local gay bar. He allegedly wrote online that “Omar Mateen [The Pulse Nightclub Shooter] is and always will be a hero.” Authorities say he believed the LGBTQ community was “destroying traditional families.” Robinson was charged with possessing child exploitation videos.
A former Florida Fish and Wildlife officer sued the state after she was reportedly fired for commenting on a Facebook group called “Velvet Guillotine” about Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
An FBI supervisor at the bureau’s microbiology lab at Quantico, Virginia, was indicted for allegedly distributing child abuse materials. Investigators say his abuse may have coincided with his work trips for the bureau.
The feds say there’s a $13 million Medicare fraud case down in Miami. And another one whose office was also in Miami, where the dead giveaway may have been that the receptionist at the company spent two years in prison and had to pay $1.3 million in restitution for a health care scheme.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Jeanine Pirro can stay on the alleged White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooter’s case, despite a defense motion attempt to disqualify them because they attended the dinner.
A 27-year-old Israeli-American man, who allegedly sold his services to call in bomb threats at Jewish Community Centers and schools across the United States in 2017, was arraigned this week in Florida. (editor’s note: We broke the story back in 2017.) The man, who was a teen at the time, was extradited to the U.S. from Norway after serving a sentence for related conduct in Israel.
Things got out of hand on a flight from Dublin. No, for those wondering, it didn’t have anything to do with the World Cup.
A disgruntled professor says a Maryland college’s bridge program is a sham.
Citizens of Humanity wants its piece of the tariff refunds. But yes, it is a real company that sells vintage-designed clothing.
A New York man says he threatened to kill President Trump believing it would help stop James Comey from hurting him.
Camp Mystic, where 28 people died during catastrophic floods in Texas last year, filed for bankruptcy.
Your song of the week has a hook that will stick with you. But if you need something entirely different, may we humbly suggest this song.
The FBI arrested an alleged pedophile in the D.C. neighborhood of Adams Morgan.
The operators of a 7-Eleven in Pennsylvania purportedly ran a SNAP racket, trading food stamps for cigarettes and other items.
Two judges in the Northern District of Texas maxed out the defendants in the Prairieland Detention Center shooting, sentencing them to between 30 and 100 years in federal prison.
A judge declined to grant a pro se litigant a preliminary injunction to block the U.S. Mint from printing Trump coins but the lawsuit forced the Treasury Department to admit they wouldn’t have enough time to print the coins by the July 4th deadline they originally aimed for.
The League of Women Voters blocked the administration from creating a national database of voters’ Social Security numbers and citizenship status.
On a similar note, a judge in Massachusetts granted summary judgment in a case brought by 23 states and D.C. challenging President Trump’s executive order on mail-in ballots.
Two more men were charged in the purported plot to attack the White House’s UFC event and the World Cup was allegedly a target as well.
A bitter ex-employee at a tech company that partners with Microsoft is set to plead guilty to cyber stalking his boss.
Former Fox News and CBS News reporter Catherine Herridge will have to pay $800 every day for refusing to testify to reveal a source after the D.C. Circuit said it wouldn’t intervene. We’re not sure why more folks in the fourth estate aren’t yelling from the rafters on this one. Shame on the silence.
A man reportedly threatened to shoot up an Ohio police department.
There were some big immigration decisions this week. Here’s one that flew under the radar, a judge ordered the release from immigration custody of five people who were covered under a Biden-era settlement to not be in custody.
Hands off our farms, says one Massachusetts judge.
The New York Times wants to know more about what FBI Director Kash Patel has been up to.
Our friend Justin at the Independent has the write-up about how an 84-year-old Florida man sued Waffle House after becoming “distracted” by its sign and tripping. The topic of Waffle House allows us to bring up our favorite segment from the erstwhile Late Show with Stephen Colbert: No shirt, no shoes, no knuckleheads.
Thanks for reading. A programming note, we expended most of our energy fighting for public access principles this week. We’re going to take off next week and celebrate America’s birthday by ignoring one of the coequal branches of government. We will, however, have a The Rabbit Hole piece this Sunday, though. If you think World Cup tickets are expensive, get ready to read a story that will make those prices feel like a steal.