November 17, 2025 — Morning Report

The AFL-CIO had filed multiple cases with this name against the Trump administration — each one involving a different agency's workers, but each using the same administration argument: these employees can't have collective bargaining rights because their work is essential to national security. The problem, as the judge noted, was that the administration had been trying to shut down many of the same agencies in other ongoing litigation. It's hard to claim an agency is so nationally vital that its employees can't strike when you're simultaneously in court arguing the agency should be dissolved. Bryan highlighted the pattern: the administration was using a "national security" carve-out to strip union rights from roughly two-thirds of all federal employees. When every department becomes a special case, the special case argument loses its force. The judge issued a preliminary injunction on the Voice of America workers and specifically noted the connection to other pending cases in front of him. Bryan also flagged the judge's finding that the executive order stripping union rights from these workers was issued right after courts blocked the administration from dismantling the agencies — and the judge called it retaliatory.

The Georgia RICO case against Trump and his co-defendants for election tampering in 2020 had been in procedural freefall after Fani Willis was removed from the case following a finding of appearance of impropriety related to a romantic relationship with the lead prosecutor she had appointed. Without a prosecutor, Georgia faced a choice: close the case or appoint a new one. The deadline to decide was a specific Friday in November 2025. According to Bryan, several prosecutors were asked and declined the case — apparently nobody wanted the political heat. Peter Skandalakis, executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia and a former DA for 33 years, agreed to step in and was appointed pro tempore to prosecute the Atlanta Judicial Circuit case. Bryan explained the case's significance: Trump faces charges including RICO (Georgia's racketeering statute), solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer (the "find the votes" call), conspiracy to commit forgery, and related counts. Bryan noted that presidential immunity under the Supreme Court's Trump v. United States decision doesn't extend to campaign activity — this case is about what Trump did as a candidate, not as president.

Bryan traced NAVA v. DHS back to 2018 and Operation Keep Safe, when ICE conducted a federal blitz on Chicago that resulted in numerous warrantless arrests without individualized suspicion. Plaintiffs sued under the Fourth Amendment. After the district court rejected the administration's motion to dismiss, the administration settled rather than take the case to a jury or SCOTUS. The settlement required ICE to define its arrest standards, train agents on them, and report warrantless civil immigration arrests from the Chicago field office. That agreement ran from May 2022 to May 2025. In January 2025, the second Trump administration resumed the same enforcement patterns, prompting plaintiffs to return to court. By November 2025, the judge had reviewed reports covering post-October 7 arrests: 46 warrantless arrests, 13 people still in the US. The judge ordered all 13 released without bond. For the bigger group — 615 people arrested before October 7 and still in detention — the settlement required bond unless they fell under mandatory detention. The government claimed everyone was subject to mandatory detention. The judge disagreed, citing his own involvement in the settlement negotiations as authority for what the parties understood the mandatory detention terms to mean. He ordered the government to identify all 615 and report whether any were an actual public danger, with a $1,500 bond order to follow.