Editor’s Note: Every year at this time we begrudgingly subject our subscribers to an annual reader drive. These types of campaigns, while vital to the future sustainability of our newsroom, can feel cold and pro forma in nature. So before we start hitting you up for support tomorrow and kick off our week-long pitch to make the case why you should support our independent news organization we thought we owed you something unique. For this week’s The Rabbit Hole, we decided to pull back the curtain on how we broke our major stories this year and give you a look at what reporting skills are required and the occasional luck that is needed to routinely break news about the U.S. Courts.
It comes, like most tips, at the worst time for a reporter. It was Friday evening, we were sitting in traffic on the way to a family vacation.
The tip had no words, simply a link to a newly-created government website we had never seen before. The tipster had no political dog in the fight, just thought we might be interested. We were. The site, which had design stylings of an early 1990s website, short on details or a proper color schema, did had a URL that ended with a .gov.
At that point, it felt like a good time on our trip to stop for McDonald’s. That would buy us ten minutes to make some reporter inquiries without using the car’s speaker phone and having to explain to our kids what alien, terrorist, and removal have to do with the U.S. courts. To be fair, at that point, we weren’t sure either. Maybe we could squeeze out another five minutes if that Mickey D’s was blessed with a play place. Until that Friday, the Alien Terrorist Removal Court had sat dormant for the last thirty years. We track a lot of courts for a living, but we’ve admittedly never heard of that one. It took us through the end of our fries to verify the site was legitimate and the Trump Administration had filed the court’s first case.
The news business is a tricky one. Especially for a small news upstart like ours. Memories are short, and moments to truly break news are fleeting. The search giants favor the big news guys, A.I. answers ignore sites like ours, and there exists an entire online ecosystem that rewards taking someone else’s reporting, stripping the attribution, and posting it as your own to goose the engagement numbers. We had two options: we could lock ourselves in one of the rental house rooms, write a story immediately and set the tone for the weekend that our family vacation was cancelled before it started or let it go and hope none of our Fourth Estate colleagues notice over the weekend. We chose to keep the vacation. Mostly. But maybe a simple tweet could quickly at least plant a flag. At 9:19pm, we threw one out on Twitter: "Created in 1996, the Alien Terrorist Removal Court was formed to “to review applications for the removal from the U.S. of alien terrorists”. The Attorney General submits applications for consideration. The Court has never received a submission. Until this week...”
By midnight, the tweet had gotten some online traction but no one had filed an actual story. So while everyone in the house slept, we sat on the tiled kitchen floor near the window, it provided the best outside light without turning on a house light lest we wake up the people in the house that didn’t sign up to a life of writing on tiled kitchen floors in the middle of the night. At 12:58am, we filed the first news story on the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, pushed it out to more than ten thousand subscribers, and promptly went to bed. By the next day, CBSNews, Associated Press, CNN, Politico, and Axios finally followed suit, citing our reporting.
We turned off our notifications for the rest of the weekend and went to the beach. When we got back home, we’d write the definitive piece of the Rip Van Winkle court.
And so what started with beach traffic, quickly translated to web traffic. And new subscribers trying to figure out how a two-man reporting crew with a yearly budget that’s less than the cost of a paid internship at every major news operation broke the story. It would not be the first time or last time this year we’ve scooped media organizations that are orders of magnitude larger than us.
Beating DOJ in Court…Twice in One Docket
The docket shouldn’t have been available. It was a habeas case, the type of federal lawsuit you file when you're locked up in ICE detention. As part of the judiciary’s privacy policies, habeas cases are considered particularly sensitive, and as such, only available for review at the court house. As we’ve reported this year, there’s teams of people around the country trying to make those public records available to the public, with mixed success. But this was different, it was filed by a pro se plaintiff, and it appears that small detail resulted in an clerical oversight that allowed for the initial filing to be accessible online. Humans make mistakes. As such, depending on the district, we make it a point to click on every docket.
A federal judge ordered the release of an Afghan national whom the U.S. government once designated a "known suspected terrorist" and flagged for "high-profile removal" after Department of Justice attorneys failed to provide the current status of a national security investigation against him.
Ahmadzai Abdul Ghafoor, who has been held in immigration custody since May 2025 and represented himself in his judicial proceedings, had claimed in court filings that he served on the security detail of the former president of Afghanistan. Ghafoor stated that he fled the country in 2021, fearing that the Taliban would retaliate against him for serving in the U.S.-backed government. According to his own account, he tried to meet with Customs and Border Protection officials multiple times before entering the U.S. illegally and surrendering himself to agents on May 30, 2025.
Tomorrow we launch our annual subscriber drive. We’ll go deep on metrics, what’s worked, and what needs work for our news organization. To do the type of reporting we wrote about in this piece, we need your support. If you’d like to save your inbox and skip getting that annual appeal, consider upgrading to a paid subscription now. If you’re already a paid subscriber but you want to provide additional support to Court Watch, we’d welcome a one-time donation.
Following a hearing over Ghafoor’s petition, Senior U.S. District Judge David Briones of the Western District of Texas ordered the Justice Department to explain why Ghafoor had been designated as a ‘known suspected terrorist,’ whether he was still under investigation, and, if so, what the status of the investigation was. Judge Briones initially ordered the government to respond to his questions. After our initial reporting on the case, those Justice Department responses were only available at the courthouse in Texas. For a news organization with no coffee budget, let alone a travel expense account, that would be a problem.
So we emailed a long-time Court Watch subscriber, Christopher Beall, a noted first amendment and media attorney, to see if he’d be up to taking a pro bono flyer. He quickly drafted a motion, we filed in June of this year, requesting the court consider lifting the court records restrictions. The judge agreed with us the next day. But before the docket was opened up, an Assistant U.S. Attorney asked the judge to reconsider his decision to allow for public access to public records.
In what can only be described as the most perfect encapsulation of public access to the courts, we couldn’t actually see what the DOJ filed about our motion because the docket was restricted to nonparties like ourselves. Nevertheless, we persisted. We blindly guessed at the government’s motion arguments and submitted our response to the court.
The judge agreed with us, again. Our successful ruling now forms the basis of judicial arguments around the country for access to more public documents.
Tower Dumps
It’s an age-old question. If a judge rules a law enforcement technique that sweeps up tens of thousands of innocent people’s data in pursuit of four suspects is unconstitutional but keeps the docket sealed from the public, is it truly unconstitutional?
The docket from the Southern District of Mississippi was purposely non-descript. U.S. v. Unknown. We normally skip reviewing dockets in that district because they usually don't rise to a national level. In this case, the initial filings were all sealed. But this docket had a curious second chair for the government, a trial attorney from Main Justice in D.C. entered an appearance for a seemingly small ball case out of Jackson, Mississippi. We were now interested.
In a sealed federal affidavit, the FBI had requested the expansive search of neighboring cell phone towers as part of an investigation into a string of killings, shooting and car thefts allegedly committed by a local gang over a 14-month period. This law enforcement technique, colloquially known as ‘Tower Dumps’ are a collection of data on all devices, such as cell phones, that have connected to specific cellular towers during a set time block. Law enforcement has long relied on tower dumps to crack complex cases and track suspects via cell phone data. In this case, the FBI wanted the records of thousands of innocent people to find their suspects. It’s a process they’ve used time and time again with little judicial pushback but it appeared they were getting some from a magistrate judge in Mississippi. The case raises a number of constitutional questions, but first you have to actually be able to read the documents.
We called our pro bono lawyer Christopher again. He began drafting a motion to unseal. Within the week, we had secured and paid for local counsel, which under the court’s local rules, would be required to file a pleading in that district. On August 14 2025, we filed our petition. Four days later, the judge sided with our request, denying the Justice Department’s submission to keep the proceedings sealed and saying that the previous sealing was an “inadvertent error.”
A year later and dozens of filings later, the government exhausted at the district-level its attempts to fight the judge’s ruling that tower dumps are unconstitutional. The Justice Department appealed the ruling in September.
Because nothing is ever easy in this business, the entire appellate docket was initially sealed. On September 28, we spent our lunch break playing phone tag with half the judicial support staff on the 5th Circuit. From an outsider's perspective, the appellate docket came from a district docket that had no discernable title and was filled with sealed documents. We calmly explained that while it may appear that the docket should be sealed, we had a court order saying it was to be accessible to the public. The clerk's office acknowledged it had been sealed in the appellate system due to yet another ‘inadvertent error.’ The Justice Department has until the end of the month to file its appellate brief.
As has always been true since Court Watch’s started four years ago, we’ll be watching.
Tomorrow we launch our week-long annual subscriber drive. We’ll go deep on metrics, what’s worked, and what needs work for our news organization. To do the type of reporting we wrote about in this piece, we need your support. If you’d like to save your inbox and skip getting that annual appeal, consider upgrading to a paid subscription now. If you’re already a paid subscriber but you want to provide additional support to Court Watch, we’d welcome a one-time donation.
