Former college football coach Nick Saban’s reported attempt to urge President Donald Trump to wield his influence over the payment of college athletes, which was first detailed by The Wall Street Journalis rubbing some people the wrong way.

It’s hard to fault them.

Saban, who has denied that name, image and likeness rules allowing student-athletes to get paid, or NIL, led him to retire from coaching last year, has been working with Republicans in Congress to clamp down on those rules ever since he left his post at the University of Alabama.

Last year, I wrote about Saban testifying at a Senate hearing on NIL rules as a guest of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and arguing that players show “less resiliency to overcome adversity” due to the current setup. He said two NFL coaches had told him that players have become too entitled and that his wife had said the only thing players care about these days is how much they’re getting paid. These were rich comments coming from Saban, who retired as the highest-paid coach in college football.

College football analyst Spencer Hall basically summarized my concerns in a recent sit-down with sports commentator Bomani Jones, in which Hall questioned Trump’s capability to navigate this complex issue — despite the two of them acknowledging that the current NIL setup probably is in need of some alterations.

The question, of course, is whether Trump, someone w Ho Helped Run the United States Football League into the groundis suited to make the sensible changes necessary.

Sports commentator Jemele Hill doesn’t seem to think so. She sent a cheeky message to college athletes after it was reported that Saban and Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., another former college coach who has bemoaned the current systemwere pushing Trump to sign an executive order on NIL.

“Pay attention college athletes .. bet you didn’t know this when or if you voted,” she wrote. “NCAA has dropped a cool $250K to lobbyists to seize control of NIL.

“Good luck!”

Attorneys at the Hagens Berman law firm, which helped secure a nearly $3 billion settlement with the NCAA related to antitrust lawsuits involving college athletes, are also skeptical. Per AL.com:

“While he was a coach, Saban initially opposed NIL payments to athletes, pushing to add restrictions and red tape through national legislation to add ‘some sort of control.’ During his time scrutinizing the athlete pay structure, he made tens of millions of dollars and was previously the highest-paid coach in college football,” Berman said.

“Coach Saban and Trump’s eleventh-hour talks of executive orders and other meddling are just more unneeded self-involvement. College athletes are spearheading historic changes and benefitting massively from NIL deals. They don’t need this unmerited interference from a coach only seeking to protect the system that made him tens of millions.”

Ja’han Jones

Ja’han Jones is an BLN opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. He is a futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics. His previous projects include “Black Hair Defined” and the “Black Obituary Project.”

As the Trump administration looks to expand its dubious plans to deport immigrants to foreign landsthey’re apparently looking to war-torn countries with poor human rights records to essentially serve as deterrents for future immigrants.

Having already sent nearly 300 immigrants — who’ve been framed as hardened criminals despite many of them appearing to have no criminal record whatsoever — to El Salvador’s brutal CECOT prison, the administration is planning to expand its deportations to Libya, NBC News reported. On Wednesday, a federal judge ruled that imminent deportation flights to Libya, or any other third country, without due process would violate his temporary restraining order.

It’s noteworthy that top Libyan officials denied that any arrangement is in place to accept immigrants from the United States, though the country’s provisional government suggested that “some parallel parties that are not subject to legitimacy” could be involved.

At the moment, Libya is effectively divided into two factions that are fighting for control of the country, which has been wrought by war and strife after the U.S.-backed coup that dislodged Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. Libya’s treatment of immigrants has been decried by human rights activistsand, given the dehumanizing things Trump has said to malign immigrants — such as his claim that they are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S. — it’s fair to wonder whether the administration sees Libya’s brutality as a benefit in this case.

And the same goes for Rwanda, whose foreign minister recently confirmed that his government was in “early talks” with the Trump administration about accepting immigrants. As multiple critics of such a deal recently explained to NPRRwanda is also plagued by human rights abuses:

Even without the expense, critics sayRwanda’s abysmal rights record under President Paul Kagame means it’s no place to resettle people.

“Rwanda under the long-ruling Kagame dictatorship is simply not a safe country, it’s a totalitarian police state by any standard,” said Jeffrey Smith, founder of pro-democracy nonprofit Vanguard Africa.

Michela Wrong, a journalist and author of a book on Rwanda, also said the country is not a suitable place to send deportees.

“This is a country where the elections are routinely rigged, where opposition activists disappear and are found murdered…where opposition leaders aren’t allowed to run in the elections, journalists are jailed or end up fleeing the country,” she said.

The Trump administration could easily look to Britain — which previously attempted a deportation arrangement with Rwanda that has widely been considered an expensive failure — for reasons why this might be a bad idea. But the administration’s multimillion-dollar prison deal with El Salvador already proves that it’s willing to waste money on cruel stunts.

But the administration’s multimillion-dollar prison deal with El Salvador already proves that it’s willing to waste money on cruel stunts.

It’s worth noting that Trump doesn’t appear to carry high regard for African nations. As you may remember, he labeled them as “shithole countries,” along with El Salvador and Haiti, during an Oval Office meeting back in 2018. He has offered no mea culpa for those bigoted remarks, so the fact he essentially wants to dump immigrants in these same places — and potentially even U.S. citizens — suggests he is seeking to punish his party’s perceived enemies and effectively threatening anyone who might defy his warped, authoritarian perception of law and order.

It certainly seems to set up a perverse reward structure for other countries. Why shore up your human rights abuses to get on America’s good side — as countries have historically had to do — when you can just tailor your brutality so it aligns with the Trump administration’s mission?

Ja’han Jones

Ja’han Jones is an BLN opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. He is a futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics. His previous projects include “Black Hair Defined” and the “Black Obituary Project.”

President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting law firms have impacted the legal world in obvious ways: the firms named in the orders are undoubtedly affected, and the impact is clear, too, on the firms that have caved and cut deals with him.

But one of the latest signs that Trump’s vengeance affects the entire legal system — and the nation — is shown by a new report highlighting a firm that wasn’t targeted in an executive order and didn’t pre-emptively cut a deal.

Citing five people familiar with the matter, The New York Times reported that big law firm Gibson Dunn “was afraid of incurring Mr. Trump’s wrath if the firm was associated publicly with a lawsuit that sought to restore legal representation for unaccompanied immigrant children.” (Neither BLN nor NBC News has independently confirmed the report.)

The Times observed that the firm’s “wariness about the recent immigration lawsuit shows that even firms that have not been targeted directly by Mr. Trump are declining to participate in legal work that challenges his agenda.”

The report, which notes that Gibson Dunn isn’t the only big firm shying away from immigration litigation, comes as unlawful aspects of the Trump administration’s immigration agenda face headwinds in court. While much important work in this space is done by public interest groupsthose groups also partner with private firms. So, limiting the pool of private lawyers who litigate against unlawful aspects of Trump’s agenda could therefore be seen as part of the agenda itself. At the very least, it’s a byproduct of Trump’s stated desire for vengeance against firms and his willingness to follow through with it.

Of course, the firms that are fighting back in court have been successful so far. That’s due, in part, to the blatantly retaliatory nature of the president’s executive orders.

In a recent ruling against one of the orders, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell wrote: “No American President has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue in this lawsuit targeting a prominent law firm with adverse actions to be executed by all Executive branch agencies but, in purpose and effect, this action draws from a playbook as old as Shakespeare, who penned the phrase: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’”

This latest report on the matter shows that some otherwise powerful firms are killing themselves, professionally speaking — perhaps in the hopes of saving themselves, professionally speaking. But whatever their strategy, firms that cave to or shy away from suing this administration are effectively working for it.

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Jordan Rubin

Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined BLN, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.