Coercive Price Fixing

In its early days, Amazon.com cultivated a reputation for low prices, which helped put a lot of small booksellers out of business. That eventually gave way to a business model based on a wide product selection and speedy delivery. Its Prime subscription system was designed to make customers focus on the benefits of free shipping and overlook the fact that the prices of the products were not much of a bargain.

Now the giant e-retailer is facing allegations that it not only abandoned the low-cost approach but actually conspired to raise the prices charged on its own platform as well as those of its competitors.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta brought a price-fixing lawsuit against Amazon in February and has just provided new details of the alleged conspiracy in a motion filed in state court in San Francisco. The document claims that when a competing platform is offering a product at a price lower than it is charging, Amazon demands that the supplier intervene to get that price increased: “Vendors, cowed by Amazon’s overwhelming bargaining leverage and fearing punishment, comply—agreeing to raise prices on competitors’ websites (often with the awareness and cooperation of the competing retailer) or to remove products from competing websites altogether. The scheme is neither subtle nor complex. It is price fixing, and it should be immediately enjoined.”

The pressure exerted by Amazon is said to be a part of a system called Can’t Realize a Profit, or CRaP, in which it cuts off orders from suppliers that don’t comply with the company’s demands.

What is notable about the California AG’s motion is that it include details on specific vendors that were said to have gotten caught up in the price fixing. For example, it quotes an email from GlobalOne Pet Products, a producer of premium pet treats, to the big pet supplies website Chewy urging it to coordinate a price increase with Amazon.

In another example, Amazon was said to have threatened to stop ordering goods from a home décor vendor called All the Rages until it arranged for price increases on the Home Depot website.

Amazon’s alleged pressure tactics were not limited to small suppliers. The motion accuses the company of leaning on Levi Strauss to get Walmart.com to boost the prices of Easy Khaki Classic pants.

The California AG obtained many communications by Amazon employees alluding to these practices. But the motion claims that those documents do not reflect the true extent of the conspiracy, given that the discovery process is said to have yielded materials advising staffers to arrange things with vendors on the phone rather than in writing.

Among the nearly 200 entries Amazon has in Violation Tracker representing nearly $3 billion in penalties, there is only one case involving price fixing—a 2022 action brought by the Washington AG which Amazon settled for $2.25 million.

Given the impressive evidence collected by the California AG, it seems likely that Amazon’s price-fixing rap sheet will soon be much more substantial.

Bizarro World at the Justice Department

Normally, my colleagues and I are happy to include a new multi-million-dollar penalty paid by a Fortune 100 company to the Justice Department in our Violation Tracker updates. This month, however, we are reluctantly creating an entry for a $17 million settlement reached with IBM.

Our hesitation stems from the fact that the case is less a legitimate enforcement action than a salvo in the Trump Administration’s ongoing crusade against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. DOJ is making an example of IBM to intimidate Corporate America into eliminating whatever vestiges remain of conventional policies designed to address systemic racism and sexism in the workplace.

Turning decades of public policy on its head, this administration has decided that those efforts to rectify discrimination are themselves discriminatory and should be the main focus of DOJ’s civil rights enforcement.

What makes the IBM case especially pernicious is that DOJ brought it under the guise of a False Claims Act action. The FCA is normally used against contractors found to have been cheating the federal government. It is most commonly applied against healthcare providers and suppliers to the Pentagon.

IBM was accused of violating its responsibilities as a federal contractor by taking race, color, national origin, or sex into account when making employment decisions, including by using a diversity modifier that tied bonus compensation for managers to achieving demographic targets.

In a press release announcing the settlement, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward proclaimed: “Merit drives promotion and opportunity. Not someone’s sex or race.” He continued: “Today’s settlement proves this Department’s commitment to ensure companies are not using taxpayer funded work to further woke unconstitutional practices in American workplaces.”

Woodward managed both to ignore the long history of exclusion and bias in U.S. corporations and to give the misleading impression that the Trump Administration’s anti-DEI efforts regarding contractors are based on a solid legal foundation. That foundation actually consists of a controversial executive order Trump issued in March and highly questionable interpretations of existing civil rights laws.

The IBM case is also troubling because the company’s supposedly illegal practices were put in place well before the Trump Administration announced its new policies. Although IBM did not admit liability, it cooperated with the DOJ in the investigation and voluntarily terminated or modified the practices in question. Like various law firms and universities targeted by Trump, IBM decided to pay off the administration to be done with the matter.

DOJ’s decision to pervert the False Claims Act to pursue bogus discrimination cases is problematic not only for companies such as IBM that will have to respond to the allegations. It also raises a question about what genuine contract fraud and bias situations are not being investigated.

At a time when the DOJ has been hollowed out by the departure of many career prosecutors, the department can ill afford to devote resources to spurious cases. The fact that it is doing so is good news only for those companies eager to adhere to the lowest ethical standards.

Taking Pride in Doing Less

Regulatory agencies used to brag about how much enforcement they did. After all, that is their job. Under Trump 2.0 agencies such as the EPA and the Justice Department’s Criminal Division Fraud Section have continued this practice, even when it meant greatly exaggerating what they had actually accomplished.

Now the Securities and Exchange Commission is taking a very different tack: It just issued a press release boasting about cutting back on its enforcement. The motivation is ideological: the current SEC leadership wants to be less aggressive in its oversight of the financial industry.

In typical Trumpian manner, the release begins with a swipe at the previous Administration, which is accused of having used the SEC “to pursue media headlines and run up numbers,” creating “misguided expectations on what constitutes effective enforcement.”

SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins  is quoted as saying: “Over the past year, the Commission has put a stop to regulation by enforcement and recentered its enforcement program on the Commission’s core mission by prioritizing cases that provide meaningful investor protection and strengthen market integrity.”

The phrase “regulation by enforcement” seems to be meant as a critique of the prior leadership’s attempt to exercise oversight over newer sectors such as cryptocurrency, which is favored under Trump 2.0, due in no small part to the fact that the President’s family business is heavily involved in the business.

Atkins’s claim to be focusing on serious fraud cases has yet to become evident in the SEC’s announcements of case resolutions. According to data collected for Violation Tracker, total penalties collected by the agency during the first 12 months of Trump 2.0 were $298 million, down from $1.6 billion during Biden’s final year. The average penalty sank from $25 million to $5 million.

This year the SEC has announced only half a dozen resolved cases against companies with a penalty of $1 million or more.

A sign of things to come can be seen in the appointment of a new director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. David Woodcock had been a partner in the corporate law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and before that was a senior staff attorney at Exxon Mobil.

Meanwhile, another easing of financial regulation was announced by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.  FinCEN is proposing a rule that would give banks much more responsibility to assess their own exposure to illicit activity such as money laundering.

This approach is justified in the usual anti-regulatory rhetoric. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is quoted as saying: “Our proposal restores common sense with a focus on keeping bad actors out of the financial system, not burying America’s banks in more red tape.” Not surprisingly, banks are thrilled with the proposal.

FinCEN and the SEC are trying to give the impression they are making enforcement more effective by focusing on the more serious cases. What is more likely is that there will be less enforcement of cases of all kinds and financial miscreants will enjoy greater impunity.

Crackdown or Anomaly?

The Trump Administration leaves no doubt where it stands on street crime and drug trafficking: it supports the harshest punishments for perpetrators. When it comes to corporate crime, the stance has generally been quite different. Trump has used his pardon power to benefit a slew of convicted businesspeople, and the Justice Department is finding new ways to offer leniency to corporate defendants.

The past two months, however, have seen a burst of case resolutions in which corporations are paying fines and settlements of $100 million or more, which could be called mega-penalties. These have included cases in areas such as environmental protection for which the Trump Administration has not usually engaged in aggressive enforcement.

For example, in a case brought by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Justice Department, a federal court in Michigan ordered utility DTE Energy to pay a $100 million penalty for Clean Air Act violations at its coke battery in River Rouge.

PacifiCorp, owned by Berkshire Hathaway, agreed to pay $575 million to resolve U.S. government claims relating to wildfires in Oregon and Washington. The government argued that the company’s electrical lines negligently started all six fires.

Walmart agreed to pay $100 million to settle a case brought by the Federal Trade Commission and a group of states alleging that the retailer caused delivery drivers to lose tens of millions of dollars’ worth of earnings, by deceiving them about the base pay, incentive pay and tips they could earn.

Aetna, owned by CVS Health, agreed to pay $117 million to resolve DOJ allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by submitting or failing to withdraw inaccurate and untruthful diagnosis codes for its Medicare Advantage Plan enrollees in order to increase its payments from Medicare.

Adobe Systems agreed to pay $150 million, including a $75 million penalty and $75 million in free services to customers,  in a case brought by the Justice Department alleging that the company’s subscription practices violated the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act by failing to clearly disclose important subscription information and provide subscribers with simple ways to cancel.

The Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) announced that Applied Materials Inc. would pay a $252 million penalty for illegal exports of U.S. semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China.

If the Trump Administration maintains this pace, it will end up with 36 mega-penalties for the year, nearly twice the number announced during the first year of Trump 2.0, according to the data collected for Violation Tracker.

That figure would give the administration a mega-penalty annual tally comparable to that of the past two Democratic presidencies. Biden’s annual total averaged 36.5 and Obama’s average was 43. For Trump 1.0 the figure was 32.

It remains to be seen whether the spate of mega-penalties of the past two months is an indication that enforcement is ramping up or is just an anomaly. In any event, it is encouraging to see that at least some federal regulators and Justice Department prosecutors are taking their job seriously.

The New Senator from the Fortune 500

Parts of MAGA world are up in arms over the decision by Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt to name Alan Armstrong to fill the Senate seat vacated by Markwayne Mullin, Trump’s new Secretary of Homeland Security. The fact that Armstrong made a political donation to Adam Kinzinger, who voted to impeach Trump while in Congress, is viewed as evidence he is insufficiently loyal to the president.

What these MAGA zealots don’t seem to care about is the fact that Armstrong spent more than a decade running a Fortune 500 energy company with a checkered regulatory record. Williams Companies, whose core business is natural gas processing and transportation, has annual revenues of about $12 billion and nearly $3 billion in profits. Armstrong received $18 million in compensation from the company last year.

As shown in Violation Tracker, Williams has paid out over $160 million in fines and settlements stemming from 120 regulatory infractions and class action lawsuits since 2000. This period closely coincides with Armstrong’s career as a top executive of the company.

Antitrust cases account for the largest portion of the penalty total, $61 million. In 2023, for example, Williams and several affiliates agreed to pay $12 million to Wisconsin natural gas buyers to settle a class action suit alleging the company was part of a price-fixing conspiracy in the early 2000s. In 2019 Williams agreed to pay $4.5 million to settle its role in litigation involving a conspiracy to raise the price of natural gas in Missouri and Kansas.

Environmental violations account for the most cases, 88 of the 120, with total penalties of $25 million. The largest of these in dollar terms is a 2023 case involving Clean Air Act violations caused by excessive emissions of volatile organic compounds, methane, and other pollutants at 15 natural gas processing plants. Williams and related entities agreed to spend an estimated $8.5 million to reduce emissions, and Williams paid a civil penalty of $3.75 million.

Williams has also been fined two dozen times for safety-related infractions, including 13 cases brought by OSHA. One of these involved the death of a worker at a facility in Wyoming.

Back in 2005, Williams paid $55 million to settle a lawsuit alleging it mismanaged an employee pension plan.

Armstrong is unlikely to accomplish much during his nine months in office, but he has made it clear his priorities will be to serve the interests of the industry to which he devoted his career. As the Washington Post put it: “Armstrong said his goal during his short stint in the Senate will be to drive ‘better policies that allow us to take advantage of our natural resources around the country,’ particularly through the passage of permitting reform legislation to speed up energy projects.”

Whether Armstrong turns out to be a total MAGA loyalist remains to be seen, but there is little doubt he will use his office to advance the pro-corporate agenda at the core of Trump’s policies.

Environmental Gaslighting

Under Trump 2.0, the Environmental Protection Agency has gone after the nation’s pollution rules the way a hyena devours a gazelle. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin proudly depicted the abandonment of the finding that climate change endangers human health as “the single largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.”

The agency has also moved to weaken limits on mercury releases from coal-burning power plants, rolled back vehicle emission standards, and eased restrictions on ethylene oxide, a cancer-causing gas used to sterilize medical devices. And much more.

Amid this environmental demolition derby, it was a shock to see a recent press release from the EPA touting that in fiscal year 2025 the agency produced its “strongest enforcement and compliance results in years.” Among what it presents as “highlights from President Trump’s first year back in office” is the claim that the EPA concluded over 2,300 civil enforcement cases, which is said to be “over 400 more than the final year of the Biden Administration and more than the last nine fiscal years.”

The first thing to point out is that nearly one-third of fiscal year 2025, which began in October 2024, occurred while Biden was still in office. Second, it is unclear whether the reference to concluded cases included those in which no penalties were imposed.

According to data collected for Violation Tracker, the EPA announced 727 civil penalty cases during FY 2025, which is far less than the 2,300 figure, and more than one-quarter of those occurred while Biden was still in office. The penalty total for the fiscal year was about $1.1 billion, a fraction of the $6 billion the EPA claims it collected in “commitments to return facilities to compliance.”

During the first 12 months of Trump 2.0, the EPA announced 586 civil penalty cases, well below the total of 889 cases during the final 12 months of Biden. The Trump cases entailed $722 million in penalties, which is vastly below the $3.2 billion total for the Biden cases during that period.

It is no surprise that an agency overseen by Donald Trump would grossly exaggerate its accomplishments. The question is why it is choosing to inflate those accomplishments that run contrary to its larger mission of weakening the country’s environmental safety net while promoting fossil fuels and sabotaging wind and solar energy.

In issuing that press release, the EPA may in effect be acknowledging that there is still a large portion of the public that cares about clean air and water and wants to control toxic substances. The agency seems to be betting that it can persuade those people it is still doing its traditional job even as it hacks away at the underpinnings of that mission.

For the time being, environmental enforcement is not defunct. But neither is it thriving in the way the EPA wants us to believe. As more and more regulations are weakened or eliminated, the amount of enforcement will continue to decline, as will the health of the country.

Coddling Rogue Corporations

When it comes to alleged terrorists, drug cartels, so-called illegal aliens, and purported fraudulent voters, Trump’s Justice Department is quick to adopt an aggressive prosecutorial posture. The DOJ is eager to throw the book at defendants.

Yet when it comes to cases involving corporate misconduct, DOJ changes from a lion to a lamb. The focus shifts to leniency and the desire to avoid putting an undue burden on companies. Restraint seems to be the primary objective.

The latest expression of the latter approach can be seen in the DOJ’s announcement of the first Department-wide policy on how corporations should be criminally prosecuted. Actually, it is a policy on how they shouldn’t be prosecuted, since the emphasis is on rewarding companies that cooperate with investigations by declining to bring charges against them.

Declinations are not a new policy. They are part of a long-term trend toward decriminalizing corporate misbehavior by using devices such as deferred prosecution and non-prosecution agreements.

Proponents of these policies argue that the emphasis should be on prosecuting individuals within corporations rather than the companies themselves. The Trump DOJ embraces this approach, putting its focus on getting corporations to self-report.

As Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche put it: “This policy draws on decades of experience across the Department and creates incentives for companies to come forward and do the right thing when misconduct occurs so that we may hold accountable the individual wrongdoers. Well-intentioned businesses know that, across the Department, they will be rewarded when they self-disclose wrongdoing, cooperate with our investigations, and remediate the misconduct.”

The new policy formalizes the incentives, laying them out in a detailed flow chart that creates a degree of clarity sorely missing from the way in which immigration cases, for example, are being handled.

Putting more emphasis on prosecuting individuals is not a bad thing, assuming they are high up on the corporate ladder, but the DOJ policy seems to be based on the assumption that misconduct is mainly initiated by lower-level employees acting on their own accord and for their own benefit. In reality, most corporate criminality is initiated to serve the needs of the company and is often encouraged, at least implicitly, by policies emanating from the c-suite. A prime example occurred at Wells Fargo, where lower-level employees facing unrealistic demands from top management to increase revenue created large numbers of bogus fee-generating add-on accounts without the knowledge of the bank’s customers.   

The only positive things to say about DOJ’s policy is that it still requires companies benefiting from a declination to pay a penalty, usually the amount of profit it received from the illicit activity, and that the declination is supposed to be made public.

There is also a provision that declinations are not to be offered in cases of corporate recidivism, “specifically, a criminal adjudication or resolution either within the last five years or otherwise based on similar misconduct by the entity engaged in the current misconduct.” This should not be taken too seriously. The history of non-prosecution and deferred prosecution agreements is filled with instances of companies getting a leniency agreement, committing more offenses, and then, instead of being prosecuted, getting another leniency agreement. It is likely the Trump DOJ’s policy will produce similar results.

Requiring companies to make penalty payments, which are usually not terribly onerous, does not begin to outweigh the benefits of completely avoiding a prosecution that could result in consequences such as being debarred from receiving federal contracts.

The DOJ’s new policy is nothing more than a continuation of the Trump Administration’s inclination to coddle rogue corporations.

A Neutered Financial Watchdog

Since its creation nearly a century ago, the Securities and Exchange Commission has been one of the country’s premier regulatory agencies, protecting investors from misconduct by large corporations and other players in financial markets.

In the early 2000s the SEC investigated accounting fraud by the likes of Enron and Worldcom. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, it brought major enforcement actions against Wall Street banks for packaging and selling toxic securities. It has brought thousands of other cases against perpetrators of market manipulation, insider trading, and foreign bribery.

You wouldn’t know this by looking at the recent track record of the agency. Under Trump 2.0 this once fierce regulator is a shadow of its former self. The watchdog has lost its bite.

The enfeeblement of the SEC is highlighted in a new report from Cornerstone Research focusing on the agency’s accounting and auditing enforcement actions. It finds that the number of such cases initiated by the SEC in 2025 dropped 68 percent from the year before and reached the lowest number since 2017.

At the same time, the total monetary settlements collected by the agency in accounting and auditing cases dropped to just $31 million, a plunge from the $907 million figure in 2024. Some 98 percent of the 2025 amount was collected during the final few weeks of the Biden Administration, meaning that under Trump 2.0 the penalties have been next to nothing.

The picture is slightly less dismal in the data collected for Violation Tracker covering SEC cases of all kinds against companies. It shows that total penalties during the first 12 months of Trump 2.0 were $298 million, down from $1.6 billion during Biden’s final year. The average penalty sank from $25 million to $5 million.

One reason for the drop is a shift in the typical defendant. Biden’s SEC brought more cases against big investment banks and other larger corporations, while under Trump the resolved matters are more likely to involve small-time players.

Even more worrying is the SEC decision to largely abandon enforcement actions against certain categories of companies, especially those involved in cryptocurrency. After Trump did an about-face on crypto, the SEC withdrew dozens of lawsuits involving that sector. That included major investigations of companies such as Coinbase and Binance. All this, of course, occurred as the Trump family itself invested heavily in crypto and got a boost from the founder of Binance.

The SEC also seems to be abandoning its role with regard to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Under Trump 2.0 the agency has not resolved a single foreign bribery case. During Biden’s final year, five such cases were completed, including one in which the weapons producer RTX Corporation (formerly known as Raytheon Technologies) paid $124 million to settle a civil case involving improper payments made to assist in obtaining contracts with the Qatari military.

Both at home and abroad, corruption is being given a freer rein by the SEC and the rest of the Trump Administration.  

A Golden Age for White-Collar Crime

Donald Trump had a lot to say about crime in his State of the Union speech. Most of it was untrue, including the assertion that criminality has completely disappeared in the District of Columbia, or ridiculous, especially the claim that his war on fraud supposedly rampant among immigrants would bring in enough revenue to eliminate the federal budget deficit.

He had nothing to say, of course, about the crimes committed by wealthy individuals. If the United States is really experiencing a “golden age,” as Trump declared, they are the ones who have amassed the biggest jackpots by breaking the rules.

Trump did not just fail to highlight white-collar crime; his administration is actively abetting it. One way it is accomplishing this is through the weakening of enforcement. Since Trump returned to office, the systems for investigating and prosecuting offenses such as criminal tax evasion and money laundering have been collapsing.

First, the DOGE chaos forced many career prosecutors, FBI agents, and IRS auditors to leave the government. Now, large numbers of the remaining DOJ staffers are being reassigned to Trump’s mass deportation crusade.

This is a dream come true for white-collar criminals, who face a much-reduced risk of being caught and prosecuted. A recent report found that in 2025 the volume of fines collected from money laundering cases decreased by more than 50 percent from the year before. At the same time, the number of investigations of abusive tax schemes dropped by more than 60 percent.

Trump is also making life better for well-off crooks through the unscrupulous use of pardons. One particularly controversial case involves Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who pled guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the move was part of an effort to end “the Biden Administration’s war on crypto.” Leavitt conveniently left out the fact that Zhao and Binance have helped to prop up the Trump family crypto startup, World Liberty Financial. And now there are reports suggesting that Binance was doing business with sanctioned parties in Iran.

Trump’s self-proclaimed war on fraud loses much of its legitimacy in light of Trump’s pardon of individuals such as Trevor Milton, the founder of the electric truck company Nikola, who had been convicted of securities and wire fraud for lying to investors. The pardon relieved him of the obligation to repay investors hundreds of millions of dollars.

This is just one of several cases in which Trump pardons will rescind the obligation of convicted fraudsters to provide compensation to their victims. Liz Oyer, a former DOJ pardon attorney, estimates the total of those lost payments at more than $1 billion.

Trump, who was himself convicted on 34 counts of business offenses in New York State court, seems to feel a particular empathy for white-collar criminals. Since Trump clings to the belief he was unjustly prosecuted, he apparently thinks anyone convicted of similar offenses must also be an innocent victim.

Between weakened enforcement and brazen pardons, Trump is effectively decriminalizing offenses that in the past landed people in prison for long stretches and yielded billions in fines. It is an unprecedented amnesty for criminals, but only for those who committed their offenses in the suites rather than the streets.

Migrant Intimidation Masquerading as Consumer Protection

It came as quite a surprise to see a recent Justice Department press release announcing that its Civil Rights Division had secured a $68 million settlement from a real estate developer accused of targeting Hispanic borrowers through predatory land sales.

That’s because it stands in stark contrast to recent track record of the Division, which has seen a sharp drop in resolved cases under Trump 2.0 and most of those that have been completed have tended to target DEI and so-called reverse discrimination.

When you read the details of the announcement, the settlement with Colony Ridge LLC starts to look like less of an anomaly. First, it turns out that the case was originated by the Biden DOJ in 2023 along with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB, which is in limbo amid the Administration’s moves to dismantle it, dropped its claims in the case rather than participating in the settlement.

Second, the $68 million price tag of the settlement includes nothing in the way of a civil penalty. Most of the total ($48 million) represents the cost of infrastructure improvements required to be made by Colony Ridge, which was accused of deceiving buyers about the flood risks in its subdivisions outside Houston.

The remaining $20 million is supposed to pay for increasing the law enforcement presence at the subdivisions. This is highly unusual in a consumer protection case. What is even stranger is that the settlement agreement specifies that these funds should primarily be used by the local sheriff’s office to help federal agencies with immigration enforcement. Colony Ridge also agreed to tighten its buyer identification procedures and “work with law enforcement to confirm that buyers are not on a published terrorism watch list and are not known members of a transnational criminal organization.”

At this point, it should be noted that the DOJ was not the only party settling with Colony Ridge. The Texas Attorney General’s Office, which had sued the company separately, was also involved.

A press release issued by Texas AG Ken Paxton puts the immigration issue at the center of the case. In fact, it alleges that Colony Ridge was involved in “the development of a de facto illegal immigrant community.” Paxton goes on to make the incredible assertion that “Colony Ridge endangered American citizens by allowing illegal aliens to run rampant on its streets, in its schools, and in its community.”

These statements are the culmination of a rightwing campaign that since 2023 has depicted the Colony Ridge subdivisions as a haven for undocumented immigrants. While the Biden Administration had sued the company for exploiting Latino homebuyers, Texas officials depicted Colony Ridge as in effect a co-conspirator in a purported effort to create a an “illegal immigrant” town that was supposedly filled with gangs and cartel members.

The hysteria around Colony Ridge was fueled by unfounded allegations pushed by the likes of the immigrant-bashing Center for Immigration Studies and far-right U.S. Rep. Brian Babin. Once Trump was back in office, one of the first immigration enforcement surges occurred in Colony Ridge, apparently at the urging of Gov. Greg Abbott.

What all this indicates is that the settlement with Colony Ridge should not be taken as a sign that the Trump DOJ, much less the Texas AG, is now concerned about Latinos being targeted by predatory lenders. This case has little to do with consumer protection and is really just another way of demonizing and intimidating undocumented migrants, even when they are trying to live the American Dream by becoming homeowners.