There have been only a handful of instances in U.S. history of top Justice Department officials publicly breaking with the White House.
Federal judges blocked deportation of those detained under the order through the weekend, and more lawsuits were filed on Monday.
Members of Migrant Justice, an activist group, claim they were targeted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as part of a large-scale campaign to suppress immigration activism in the US.
Plaintiffs said they were harassed and intimidated by Ice officials. An Ice officer told the facility he had brought them a “famous person”, after arresting Jose Enrique Balcazar Sanchez, a plaintiff who joined Migrant Justice in 2011 and is one of its main spokesmen.
Bilott is given to understatement. (‘‘To say that Rob Bilott is understated,’’ his colleague Edison Hill says, ‘‘is an understatement.’’) The story that Bilott began to see, cross-legged on his office floor, was astounding in its breadth, specificity and sheer brazenness. ‘‘I was shocked,’’ he said.
The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare. Rob Bilott was a corporate defense attorney for eight years. Then he took on an environmental suit that would upend his entire career — and expose a brazen, decades-long history of chemical pollution.
But last June, based on a comprehensive review of previous health studies, Philippe Grandjean of the Harvard School of Public Health and Richard Clapp of the University of Massachusetts-Lowell named an ‘‘approximate’’ safe level of 0.001 p.p.b. Soon thereafter, the nonprofit Environmental Working Group analyzed two years of E.P.A. survey data to find that this threshold had been exceeded — in some cases by factors of 100 or more — in 94 water systems across 27 states. Below, the estimated number of people in each state whose drinking water is affected.