2026-08-14 19:30:00
The plane was stuck on the tarmac of a Louisiana airport, but Yurin Quiroa Ralda, 21, was not particularly eager to take off. He was being deported, based in part on misinterpreted records. And not to his birthplace, Guatemala, but to Ecuador, where he’d never even been.
That alone was a nightmare, but Yurin’s situation was even more frustrating: After he’d crossed the US-Mexico border alone at age 16, the US government told him that if he waited patiently, he could apply for a green card because he had Special Immigrant Juvenile status, a classification reserved for kids who were abused, abandoned, or neglected by a parent. Congress created SIJ status in 1990, to give these kids a pathway to legal permanent residency so they wouldn’t have to go back to families that harmed them. Yurin, whose dad had abandoned him before he was born, had followed the rules and waited—and he’d recently became eligible to apply for a green card. Yet here he was on a plane bound for Ecuador.
A judge in a similar case cited the administration’s “reprehensible act of unimaginable cruelty,” noting, “Unquestionably, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy.”
Thousands of kids with SIJ status live in the United States, though many have grown into young adults. Like Yurin, whom I wasn’t able to interview directly for this story, they’ve spent years on waitlists because the government has a cap on visas that it can issue each year. While they waited, the Biden administration gave them deferred action, a designation that temporarily shields a person from deportation and allows them to work. But despite this safeguard, President Trump’s immigration officers detained about 400 people with SIJ status and deported 132 of them during his first year back in office, according to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data shared with Congress.
These kids were told, “‘You should stay here; here’s your protection,” says Molly Huffaker, an attorney who represents Yurin at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center. “All they’ve gotten is a broken promise,” adds Ellie Norton, an attorney at the National Immigration Project who focuses on SIJ cases.
The Trump administration officially ended Biden’s policy for SIJ youth in June 2025, saying it would no longer offer deferred action to people on the government waitlists. A court blocked that move on the grounds that DHS hadn’t jumped through the necessary bureaucratic hoops. The administration tried again in April (a lawsuit against its second attempt is ongoing), emphasizing that the restrictions would only apply to new cases, and that people who already had deferred action, like Yurin, could keep their status.
Yet Trump’s immigration officers are detaining those young men and women anyway, says Rachel Davidson, who directs the End SIJS Backlog Coalition at the National Immigration Project, which helped file the aforementioned lawsuit. “If the courts are going to impede [DHS] on a systemic level from terminating the policy writ large,” she told me, “then what they’re doing is going after young people individually, one by one.”
Yurin’s nightmare began last November, when local law enforcement pulled over his cousin for speeding in West Virginia. Yurin, a passenger, had an immigration background that should have helped him: He’d gotten SIJ status because his dad had abandoned him and his mom in Guatemala, leaving them financially insecure and facing eviction. He had to drop out of school at age 12 to work construction. He arrived in the United States in 2021, fleeing gang violence and seeking asylum. Most recently, he’d lived in Michigan with relatives and in Maryland, taking English classes and dreaming of becoming a mechanic.
The cops called ICE, which shipped him to a detention center in Pennsylvania hundreds of miles away. For months, he was trapped in bureaucratic hell: The legal status he’d obtained seemed meaningless, and deferred action wasn’t enough to get him out of detention. And though there was good news on the horizon—he would become eligible to apply for a green card in March, after years of waiting—a judge ordered him deported in February.
When his attorneys pushed back, the judge said—confusingly—that he couldn’t budge because Yurin had a criminal record. Three years earlier, when he was 18, he’d gotten into a car accident while driving his cousin’s kids to school and wound up with a misdemeanor. He’d allegedly rear-ended someone and then run a stop sign, whereupon another car hit him, injuring the kids. His relatively minor offense—a moving violation resulting in physical injury—didn’t affect his SIJ status, according to his attorneys.
But immigration officials were now claiming he had four assault charges from the same year. Yurin insisted he had no idea what they were talking about. His attorney, Molly Huffaker, reached out to the relevant police department for clarification and requested records of the alleged incident, but nobody responded.
I recently obtained those records, along with records from the county sheriff and local prosecutors. It’s now clear that federal officials either mischaracterized or misunderstood the situation, or that they had bad documentation. On August 12, 2023, the same day they claimed four assault charges were filed against him, Yurin had reported to the jail for booking on four initial charges related to the car accident. None of them involved assault, and he was never charged with assault in the police records I obtained. In other words, Yurin was being blamed for a crime that never happened.
“It’s devastating that that mischaracterization may be the only reason he was detained and deported,” his attorney Huffaker told me after I showed her the records. She says a witness at the scene of his arrest in West Virginia overheard the officers say they were specifically detaining Yurin for his “assault record.”
In April, stuck in detention with his deportation looming, Yurin filed a habeas corpus petition arguing that his incarceration was unlawful because he had deferred action. The court dismissed his petition on a technicality—federal law says that anyone with a final deportation order is subject to mandatory detention for 90 days, and he was still within that 90-day window; he could resubmit his petition when the window ended June 11.
If only.
Less than a week before June 11, the administration terminated Yurin’s deferred action. This was always a possibility. Deferred action is a temporary protection and the government has discretion to end it on a case by case basis, typically if a person’s circumstances change significantly and they’re no longer eligible for SIJ. But the timing, so long after his alleged criminal offenses and his arrest by ICE, and just days before he could refile his habeas petition, seemed suspicious.
Yurin’s attorneys accused the administration of retaliating against him for pursuing habeas claims, in violation of his First Amendment rights as well as his Fifth Amendment right to due process. Its actions in this case were hardly a one-off, according to the National Immigration Project: “It’s an unwritten practice,” says attorney Norton.
In March, a federal judge in New York slammed the administration for doing something similar to Garcia Lanza, a 24-year-old from Honduras who came to the country at age 9, graduated magna cum laude from the New York City College of Technology, and had no criminal record. US District Judge Gary Brown described the termination of Lanza’s deferred action as “seemingly retaliatory”: It appeared the government was trying to “rationalize his illegal arrest and detention,” he wrote, calling the termination a “reprehensible act of unimaginable cruelty.”
“He cannot understand why the same government that once granted him protection is now trying to send him to a foreign country.”
“This isn’t how things are supposed to work in America,” the judge wrote. “Unquestionably, the laws of human decency condemn such villainy.” He reinstated Lanza’s deferred action.
That precedent might have helped Yurin. Unfortunately, the jurist overseeing his case in Louisiana, US District Judge Jerry Edwards Jr., paid more attention to a less favorable ruling in Tennessee that essentially says people don’t have due process rights when it comes to discretionary benefits like deferred action. On that basis, Edwards declined to reinstate Yurin’s deferred action, writing that the government “owed him no notice or opportunity to be heard before terminating it.”
“It’s so sad and problematic,” attorney Norton says of the ruling. These young immigrants “followed all the rules and did everything right—they were on the path to lawful status, and the government promised them that unlike when they were let down by their parents, someone was going to protect them and cared about what was best for them. It’s difficult for them to be in detention and not understand what they did wrong and what they did to deserve that.”
DHS defended its decision. “Special Immigrant Juvenile classification or providing a path to a Green Card does NOT confer lawful status,” a department spokesperson told me. “This is standard procedure and there is nothing retaliatory about enforcing the nation’s immigration laws. Yurin was afforded due process before the Executive Office for Immigration Review.”
The DHS spokesperson emphasized Yurin’s alleged assault history. When I showed them the records indicating that the assault never happened, they declined to comment other than referring me to the local police department and adding that Yurin would have been eligible for deportation anyway. The spokesperson also said that “hundreds of suspected and confirmed adult gang members” were let into the country under the SIJ program, and that the program is “infected with fraud and abuses.” A DHS report last year made similar claims and accused people of lying to receive the status.
Before his deportation, Yurin’s attorneys begged the court to reconsider. The judge had opted to send him to Ecuador because his asylum application said Guatemala was too dangerous. The attorneys pointed out that he had no status in Ecuador, had never been there, and knew nobody. “He cannot understand why the same government that once granted him protection,” they had written earlier, “is now trying to send him to a foreign country.”
The judge held firm, and on June 11, seven months after he was detained, Yurin boarded the plane in Louisiana. It was not what he wanted, but he figured at least his bureaucratic hell might finally be over.
Or not.
As he waited for the plane to take off, an officer approached and told him to get up. He would not be going to Ecuador after all. (Huffaker, his attorney, isn’t sure why, but notes that sending someone to a country where they have no history is more difficult and requires certain paperwork.)
Yurin called his cousins the next day to let them know he was still in the United States. Then the family lost touch with him. Huffaker reached out to all the government contacts she could think of to ask where he was.
Almost a week later, he called his cousins again—from Guatemala.
Soon after, ICE reached out to Huffaker with an offer: The agency admitted that Guatemala was not listed on Yurin’s official removal order; he should not have been sent there. So if he wanted, they would bring him back to the United States.
But there was a caveat: If Yurin agreed to return, the agency said, they would keep him in detention until they found a way to deport him again. The nightmare would continue.
Huffaker hasn’t had the opportunity to relay the offer, in any case. She hasn’t been able to reach Yurin since he was shipped back to Guatemala.
2026-08-14 19:30:00
It seems extremely unlikely that accused rapists and sex traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate will be released from Miami’s federal detention center, where they’re being held. For one thing, the brothers are awaiting extradition to the United Kingdom to face sprawling charges related to sex trafficking, rape, assault, and indecent images of a child, and the Trump administration has declined to step in. For another, as government prosecutors laid out in a filing opposing pre-trial release earlier this week, there is something of a flight risk, given that Andrew Tate previously used an alter-ego Twitter account to brag about being, in his words, “above the law” and “hard to kill,” as well as having of four or five passports and nine drivers’ licenses in several names. “I have had warrants out for my arrest and travelled freely,” @OfWudan, an account linked to Tate, tweeted in 2019. “I am smarter than you. I am Steven Seagal. I am above the law.” (Tristan Tate, according to the prosecutors’ filing, is similarly alleged by UK authorities to have a Mexican passport bearing his photo and date of birth, but with the name “Vladimir Scorpius,” a James Bond villain.)
The mountain impeding the Tates’ pretrial release, then, is extremely high, but Joseph McBride is determined to climb it. McBride, a New York attorney representing both brothers, has launched an aggressive, quixotic, and highly public quest to free the Tates and promote a positive image of the two men. He’s using several tools to do so, including podcasting (both on his own, entitled Judgment Day, and through appearances on others’ shows), intense media engagement, a rally outside the jail, verbose tweeting, and, most unusually of all, a flood of AI-generated images released on X and Instagram.
The faked images typically show the Tates manfully bearing their suffering in the clink: meditating in orange jumpsuits together atop a bunk, for instance, or dually staring at the viewer from inside a filthy cell. He also shared a striking image of the Tates sitting around a table with prominent men from across the historical spectrum—from Joe Rogan back through George Washington, with his tricorn hat looming oddly behind his head—accompanied by a lengthy caption on the importance of masculinity. It begins with a claim that the “manosphere built Western society.”
McBride, who previously represented a series of January 6 defendants, describes himself on social media as a “traditional Catholic Warrior” and a “Defender of American Patriots, The Constitution, and Andrew & Tristan Tate.” (Besides the extradition case, he’s also representing the Tates in a Florida defamation lawsuit they are waging against one of their accusers.) McBride has cast the cases against the brothers as an attack by “the system”—a term that the Tates also use—due to their purported advocacy for men.
“His message is male empowerment,” McBride tweeted in May, referring to Andrew Tate. “The system cannot control strong men. That is why he is public enemy number one. Escape the Matrix.” This week, McBride told podcaster Michael Malice that he fears the Tates will be “Epsteined” in jail, by which he meant murdered.
“Strategically, a picture is worth 1,000 words,” claims the Tates’ lawyer.
In an email, McBride told me the allegations in the government’s filing opposing the Tates’ release are false. “On Monday, the government filed a brief that drips with falsehood from every page. Our reply will be filed on or before August 21, and it will answer that brief lie by lie and line by line, on paper, with documents,” he wrote. “Every claim in the government’s filing,” he added, “will be tested against the record.”
McBride was less eager to discuss the AI images of the Tates he’s been posting—there have been at least nine since July—and declined to disclose what image generating tool was used to construct the memes. “This is my favorite question,” he told me. “Two men who are convicted of nothing, on any continent, in any court, are sitting in solitary confinement at the request of a foreign government that has not even filed its extradition papers, and Mother Jones wants to know what software their lawyer uses to make pictures. You found the scandal, Ms. Merlan. It is not the unconvicted men in the SHU. It is the memes. When you are ready to ask a question about the Constitution, you know how to find me.”
I did not ask a question about the Constitution—I couldn’t think of a relevant one at the moment—but in a followup email, McBride clarified that the AI-generated images are part of his overall plan to represent the Tates. “Strategically, a picture is worth 1,000 words,” he told me.
McBride also said that despite the previous tweets from the @OfWudan account, Andrew Tate does not consider himself to be above the law. “No one is above the law, and no one is beneath its protection,” he wrote. “Andrew Tate is convicted of nothing and charged with no American crime. The government is quoting tweets in a federal court filing. That tells you everything you need to know about the strength of its case.”
The Tates are, as New Yorker reporter Heidi Blake laid out in a lengthy June investigation, intensely politically connected, with fans in Trump’s administration and family, including Donald Trump Jr. and Barron Trump. Blake’s piece describes McBride himself as “a star in MAGA circles, dining at Mar-a-Lago and befriending Donald Trump, Jr.” (The two were photographed together at a 2022 New York Young Republican Club gala.)
Yet those political connections haven’t served them particularly well lately; in his emails, McBride decried the “gutless pussies” in Congress, as he put it, who have privately voiced fandom for the Tates but haven’t spoken up in their defense.
“Many members of Congress have, at different places and times, privately expressed their disapproval of the allegations against Andrew and Tristan Tate,” McBride wrote. “They have also asked for social media advice, messages for their kids, and have asked to take photos with the brothers. Andrew and Tristan give of their time freely. There was never an ask or expectation of anything in return. I am simply voicing my displeasure with their predictable silence regarding speaking out against injustice during times where courage is needed.”
For now, the Tates remain in the Miami facility’s special housing unit, separate from the general population. Andrew’s X account continues to proclaim the brothers’ innocence and protest their jail conditions. Neither McBride nor anyone else connected with the Tates have disclosed how he’s tweeting from jail, or who else may be posting on his behalf. The government, meanwhile, has said in their filings that the Tates are being held in the SHU for their own protection, that conditions at the jail are reasonable, and that the brothers have been accorded things other SHU inmates are not, including joint meetings with their lawyers and access to the commissary. To drive the point home, the prosecutors included a receipt detailing the brothers’ purchases of ramen, coffee, Doritos, and Twix.
A hearing on their pretrial release motion is scheduled for August 27.
2026-08-14 19:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Matthew LaPlante doesn’t have to go to a lab to see his research in action. On some mornings, he can just look out his own window in the mountains high above Salt Lake City. After a warm night when the temperature stays above freezing, he’ll wake up and see that the snow level has dropped by inches, revealing more of the aspens he taps for syrup.
“It feels like a monster came and just in the middle of the night, took a bite out of a snowpack,” said LaPlante, a journalist and climate scientist at Utah State University.
So it’s fitting that scientists have started calling these kinds of heat waves, marked by unusually high temperatures in the spring and early summer, “snow eaters.”
LaPlante was part of a recent study, published in the journal Science Advances, that attempted, for the first time, to identify what conditions exactly make for a “snow eater.” Compared to normal warm spells or heat waves, the researchers determined that these events happen when temperatures stay above freezing through both day and night for multiple days, typically three to five. These events can roughly double the rate at which snow melts, causing flooding and making it challenging to manage water resources.
“Snow eaters” appear to be occurring earlier in the year and becoming more widespread in the Western United States as the climate warms. Since the 1850s, the study found, the area affected by snow eaters has increased by an average of about 40,000 square miles per century, and the first snow eater of the season has been arriving about one month earlier per century.
“Water that would otherwise be stored as snow comes out early, and then we have to deal with it as a hazard instead of a resource.”
The term “snow eater” has a murky history. By at least the 1880s, people in the West were talking about “snow-eating” chinooks, warm mountain winds that make snow disappear quickly. More recently, the phrase “snow-eater heat wave” first made headlines in March, when an early heat wave enveloped much of the West, quickly wiping away snowpack in the Colorado Rockies and California’s Sierra Nevada. The scientists hope the catchy, evocative term can help draw more attention to this type of heat wave, since there’s still a lot to learn. The study only looked at the Western US, but snow eater heat waves almost assuredly occur elsewhere, LaPlante said.
Solar radiation is a major, but sometimes overlooked, driver of snowmelt, said Noah Molotch, a professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder who was not involved in the new study. When it interacts with heat waves, those impacts are amplified. As snow crystals warm up, they lose some of their structure and light-reflecting abilities, causing snowpacks to absorb more sunlight and melt faster. “It’s a little bit of a—no pun intended—a snowball effect,” he said.
Much of the Western U.S. saw record-low snowpack this spring. What was really unusual about it, Molotch said, was how widespread it was. Colorado received less precipitation than normal this winter, while California got lots of precipitation, but in the form of rain instead of snow. But across the region, “the one thing in common was above-average air temperatures,” Molotch said.
These conditions have likely helped fuel exceptionally severe wildfires in the West, from Utah to Spokane, Washington, where hundreds of homes burned earlier this month. “Drought stress for mountain forests around the Western US is heavily dictated by the snow that accumulates each winter and then melts through the spring and summer,” Molotch said. “There is a direct connection there in terms of the water availability and drought stress that can provide one of the important ingredients for increases in wildfire intensity and frequency.”
If scientists are able to better predict what will happen to snowpack, it could help water managers plan for what’s coming. Early or rapid snowmelt poses problems for managing water resources in the West, where snowpack serves as a key source of fresh water in the drier summer months. “Water that would otherwise be stored as snow comes out early, and then we have to deal with it as a hazard instead of a resource at our reservoirs and along the rivers and streams,” said Ben Hatchett, a co-author on the study and a scientist at Colorado State University’s Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere.
Snow-eater heat waves also may pose risks to skiers, hikers, and anyone else on or near mountains. They could be linked to hazards such as avalanches, glacial collapses, and permafrost melt, Hatchett said, though scientists are still investigating those connections. He lives in the Sierra Nevada, and he’s noticed one tangible change over his lifetime: The soundscape has changed.
“At night, it used to be quiet,” he said. “And now it’s not quiet, because everything’s melting all the time.”
2026-08-14 06:23:12
On Wednesday, the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a ruling blocking key measures of Texas’ sweeping voter suppression law, SB 1.
A lower court previously ruled that the law, which effectively made it harder for people to vote with assistance, violated disability civil rights laws. It also created more barriers to voting by mail.
“It has long been established that mail-in ballots are prone to fraud,” Judge Andrew Oldham wrote, according to Democracy Docket. “That is why voting by mail jeopardizes election integrity and democracy itself.”
There is no evidence that mail-in ballots are “prone to fraud.” An analysis from the Brookings Institution found an “average total mail voting fraud percentage across the 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 general elections of only 0.000043 [percent].” Or, about 4 votes per 10 million votes. Mail-in voting can be very important for disabled and aging people, who otherwise may have to deal with accessibility challenges with getting to the polls and access issues when voting itself.
One of the plaintiffs of the initial lawsuit, La Union del Pueblo Entero v. Abbott, filed in 2021, is the historically Black sorority Delta Sigma Theta. One of its members, Candace Wicks told me in 2024 that she was frustrated about the barriers disabled people faced while voting since SB. 1.
Disabled people, Wicks said, “face barriers every day in terms of discrimination in our daily lives.” SB1, which she sees as a form of disenfranchisement, is to her just one example. “We need to make our democracy accessible to everybody, regardless of our ability,” she said.
Research from the Brennan Center found that SB 1 in Texas had devastating impacts when many of its provisions in effect. A 2025 research paper found that thousands of Texans, disproportionately people of color, had their ballots rejected in the 2022 primary due to SB. 1. People whose ballots were rejected were less likely to vote in the 2022 general election in November and also were less likely to vote in 2024.
Wednesday’s ruling could impact turnout for the 2026 Texas Senate race, where Democrat James Talarico has a shot at flipping that Texas Senate seat Blue in a contest against Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
2026-08-14 04:52:34
Can an average guy build a killer drone in his garage?
That’s the question reporter Matt Smith set out to answer over the course of 11 months, armed with zero engineering background and only a handful of AI chatbots to guide him, in this collaboration between Mother Jones and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
His goal: a fully autonomous self-guided drone, one a theoretical evildoer could walk away from even as it continued carrying out its mission—with no humans involved. AI companies claim their models have built in limits or “guardrails,” but Smith wanted to see how well those would actually hold up.
It didn’t take much convincing. The chatbots handed him a shopping list—everything from propellers to an onboard computer—and walked him through the assembly and programming, coaching a man with the technical chops of an 11th grader.
Watch what happened next—and what it reveals about how close AI has brought us to a world where anyone can build an autonomous killer weapon.
Because if a guy with zero training can get this far, the question isn’t whether he succeeded—but who else is asking.
Read the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article which outlines the project in more detail here.
2026-08-14 02:38:15
On February 27, Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) stood before the Cuyahoga County Court to request an emergency civil protection order (CPO) requiring that his ex-wife Emily Moreno stay away from him.
Miller’s rationale, he said, was that Moreno was harassing him with serious accusations that were untrue. Under penalty of perjury, he said he had evidence to prove it.
“I filed today because my ex-wife is making allegations against me,” Miller told the magistrate judge, Jessica Bartolozzi. “She is making allegations against me…that never happened. And I have video and text message evidence showing the contrary of that.”
Miller eventually dismissed the petition for a CPO voluntarily after the order had been in effect for five months; his lawyer testified in late July that Miller no longer had any “concern for his safety and well-being at this time.” In recent filings, however, Moreno’s counsel suggests Miller fabricated his initial reason for concern.
Miller had been granted the emergency CPO in February partly in response to his claims that he had evidence disproving Moreno’s accusation that he had injured her during a custody exchange of their daughter on February 1.
Moreno’s allegation that Miller shoved her against a wall that day had surfaced during an interview with detectives who were investigating possible child abuse related to their two-year-old daughter’s broken collarbone. As Mother Jones reported last month, Moreno told the detectives she couldn’t rule out Miller had caused the toddler’s injury because her ex-husband had also allegedly been abusive towards her. (The child abuse allegation was, in the end, “unsubstantiated,” which means there was not sufficient evidence to prove abuse or neglect.)
Miller has vehemently denied ever physically hurting the child or Moreno—including during the February custody exchange in question. “I have evidence supporting that fact,” Miller said when requesting the CPO, explaining that his girlfriend was an eye witness to the exchange and that video footage proved the girlfriend was present.
But a few weeks after the temporary protection order was granted, Miller and his lawyers recanted some of the highly specific evidence Miller repeatedly attested to possessing. One of his lawyers, Pamela J. MacAdams, emailed Moreno’s lawyers about the situation in mid-March.
“After reviewing the ring doorbell tapes from February 1, 2026, we learned that [Miller’s girlfriend] was in fact not likely present at Max’s home during the time of the child exchange,” said the email, which was referenced in the domestic court filings. “We simply ethically feel the need to disclose to you this edit to our assertions about the evidence of that day.”
According to Rule 3.3 of the Ohio Professional Rules of Conduct, lawyers in the state are ethically and legally required to speak up if they come to understand that material evidence was not accurately described to a court.
“If a lawyer, the lawyer’s client, or a witness called by the lawyer has offered material evidence and the lawyer comes to know of its falsity, the lawyer shall take reasonable measures to remedy the situation, including, if necessary, disclosure to the tribunal,” states the rule, entitled “Candor to the Tribunal.”
In an August 6 motion, Moreno argues that Miller’s lawyers failed to take the required remedial steps. While they did email Moreno’s lawyer, Miller’s attorneys did not inform magistrate Bartolozzi that their client made “false statements.”
“Petitioner’s attorneys had an affirmative obligation to alert this Court. The obligation for ‘candor towards the tribunal’ is not satisfied by writing a letter to opposing counsel. Simply put, opposing counsel is not the same as the court,” the motion, filed by Moreno’s lawyers, contend. Neither Miller’s lawyers nor spokespeople responded to Mother Jones’ request for comment.
Filings suggest Miller or his lawyers had informed police and the Department of Family Services that they had “mistake[n]” what happened during the February 1 custody exchange. But by not informing the body that issued the emergency CPO, Moreno’s counsel argues that Miller’s CPO was based on a fictional account.
“Without [the girlfriend’s] corroboration, Petitioner would have no proof this incident did or did not occur. As such, her ability to verify Petitioner’s claims regarding the incident were necessary, and Magistrate Bartolozzi’s issuance of an ex parte CPO would have been founded on the basis of Petitioner’s allegations of her presence and video proof. That CPO lasted five months,” the motion says.
In a series of questions and answers between Miller and one of his attorneys, this is how Miller initially described his supposed eye-witness evidence from the February 1 custody exchange in which Moreno has said she was assaulted.
Andrew Brown (Miller’s lawyer): Did you thereafter collect evidence to establish that that is untrue?
Miller: Yes.
Brown: Is one piece of evidence that you collected a witness statement from an individual who was present there?
Miller: That is correct.
Brown: Okay. And what is that statement, and who made that statement, and what is the general statement?
Miller: My girlfriend, her name is [redacted], very nice lady. She works night shift. So her shift starts at 7 pm, and she leaves usually around 6:30. Every time that Emily comes for pick up time, [girlfriend] hides…
Brown: Did [girlfriend] say she was present during the custody exchange?
Miller: Yes, she was.
Brown: Did [girlfriend] say she didn’t hear any kind of distress, commotion, pushing, shoving, thumping, anything of that nature?
Miller: That is correct, and she was looking through the window to make sure, and she always does this, she always looks after me during pick up time because she knows that it’s a very tense time for us, and so she was always keeping an eye on things that are happening at pick up time because she knows that it’s a very tense time for us, and so she was always keeping an eye on things that are happening at pick up time.
Brown: Do you have video surveillance at your home?
Miller: I do.
Brown:: Do you have video Ring doorbell surveillance?
Miller: I do.Brown: Do you have video surveillance overlooking your driveway?
Miller: I do.
Brown: Does the video surveillance from your home establish that your girlfriend was present immediately preceding the custody exchange?
Miller: Yes.
Miller has faced calls from at least six Republican Senators—including ex-father-in-law Bernie Moreno, Jon Husted, Roger Marshall, and Katie Britt—to drop his bid for reelection. However, the window for Miller to withdraw and to be replaced on the ballot passed earlier this week.
While Miller dismissed his motion for a protection order in late July, his custody battle with Emily Moreno is ongoing. The next court appearance is currently slated for two days after Election Day.
