Today on Lawfare: Dec. 1, 2025

From Lawfare's Editorial Team.

Compiled by Isabel Arroyo.

Articles

Due Process in Third Country Removals

Matthew Boaz evaluated how removing noncitizens to “third countries” helps the Trump administration circumvent certain due process obligations under immigration law. Boaz detailed the removal processes available in different deportation cases and argued that those at risk of removal to a third country should have protections on par with those facing traditional expedited removal.

It is clear, therefore, that those subjected to third country removals should have access to the same regime made available to those in expedited removal. This would require notice of a proposed country for removal, an opportunity to articulate fear of removal to the designated country, an RFI conducted within a reasonable amount of time, and review of that RFI decision by an immigration judge. As explained above, either a positive RFI or a positive decision by an immigration judge reviewing the RFI de novo would be sufficient to grant relief. Presently, the process outlined by DHS does not provide for such review, deviating from the regulatory standard.

Like Social Media, AI Requires Difficult Choices

Nathan E. Sanders and Bruce Schneier described how four major decisions will shape the future of artificial intelligence (AI) and stressed the need to avoid the same sort of policy naïvete that plagued the rise of social media.

To that end, we spotlight four pivotal choices facing private and public actors. These choices are similar to those we faced during the advent of social media, and in retrospect we can see that we made the wrong decisions back then. Our collective choices in 2025—choices made by tech CEOs, politicians, and citizens alike—may dictate whether AI is applied to positive and pro-democratic, or harmful and civically destructive, ends.

DeepSeek and Musk’s Grok Both Toe the Party Line

In the latest issue of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren discussed DeepSeek’s tendency to write inferior code when responding to geopolitically sensitive prompts, a new report exposing personnel and operations at Iranian cyberespionage group Charming Kitten, pervasive cybersecurity myths, and more.

CrowdStrike thinks it’s unlikely DeepSeek specifically trained its models to produce insecure code when specific topics are mentioned, but speculates that it produces less secure code in these tests as a result of “emergent misalignment.” Fine tuning models to produce ‘correct’ results in one relatively narrow domain results in bad output across a range of other topics.

Podcasts

Lawfare Daily: Grading the Trump Administration’s Cybersecurity Efforts, with Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery: Jonathan Cedarbaum sat down with Mark Montgomery to discuss how Trump administration funding and staffing decisions have impacted output at leading agencies responsible for cybersecurity, the weakening of public-private collaboration, the closing of the Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council, and more.

Announcements

Beginning on Dec. 10, Laura Field, the author of “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right,” will teach a 6-part class on the conservative intellectual movement and how it has shaped Donald Trump’s presidency as a part of the Lawfare Lecture series. You can gain access to these classes by becoming a paid supporter at Patreon or Substack. The lectures will also be published on Lawfare’s YouTube channel on a delayed timeline.

Submissions are now open for Lawfare’s annual Ask Us Anything podcast, an opportunity for you to ask Lawfare editors and contributors your most burning questions of the year. You can submit questions through Dec. 16.

Lawfare’s new Domestic Deployments Tracker maps federal non-disaster deployments of the military within U.S. borders. You can read more about the tracker here.

The Trials of the Trump Administration, our coverage of Trump’s executive actions and their legal challenges, now includes a page devoted to tracking the status of Alien Enemies Act cases in federal courts. Find the page here.

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