Political News

The president feels absolutely no remorse about doxing Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton.

Donald Trump rationalized the stunning overstep while speaking with reporters Saturday, defending the decision to post Cotton’s personal phone number as a method to pressure him into bending to Trump’s position on daylight saving time.

“We want to get away from this ridiculous way and custom of—every twice a year, turning your clocks back, turning your clocks forward, being late to dinner, being late for very important meetings, it’s ridiculous,” Trump said.

“We don’t want to change clocks twice a year. It’s very expensive, it’s got many problems,” Trump continued.

The House passed the Sunshine Protection Act in July, moving to officially do away with the notion of daylight savings within the 50 states. But Cotton’s staunch opposition to the bill—largely over the prospect of dark winter mornings—has stalled its progress in the Senate.

While addressing the matter on the Senate floor last year, Cotton warned that in some parts of Arkansas, sunrise would not occur until after 8 a.m. if they chose to do away with daylight savings, forcing children, commuters, farmers, and construction workers to begin their days in darkness.

“No one likes changing the clock, me included, but Congress has enacted permanent Daylight Savings Time multiple times before and repealed it each time once Americans experienced absurdly late sunrises in the winter,” Cotton wrote on X Saturday, responding to Trump’s remarks. “Arkansans don’t want their kids going to school in the pitch dark, and I’ll always put Arkansas first.”

Trump’s pressure campaign was not as well received by Cotton’s fellow Senate Republicans, however. In an interview with NBC News, Louisiana Senator John Kennedy said that Trump “can go from zero to a–hole in about three seconds.”

“Every now and then, there are disputes in Congress that have existential significance for the future of Western civilization. Daylight savings time is not one of them,” Kennedy told Kristen Welker on Sunday. “I don’t think he should have given out Tom’s cell phone number. I don’t think that’s going to help convince Tom.”

Former White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt—who resigned from her post in August to spend more time with family after birthing her second child—just got a new job at Fox News.

“Karoline’s firsthand experience in the White House and on the presidential campaign trail gives her a distinct understanding of today’s political landscape,” Fox News Media Chief Executive Suzanne Scott said in a statement.

In her own statement, Leavitt promised to bring “the unique perspective and candor that defined my tenure with the Trump administration.”

Leavitt joined the Trump administration in 2019, and in 2024 ran an unsuccessful campaign for Congress in New Hampshire before returning to serve as White House Press Secretary. She was the youngest press secretary ever at 28 years old, and has still not been replaced. She often made headlines for complete falsities, lying about Trump blocking $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza, blaming a deadly collision between a military helicopter and an American Airlines flight on DEI, calling the Epstein files a “Democratic hoax,” and she saying that wrongly deported Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a “foreign terrorist” and “MS-13 gang member” who was “engaged in human trafficking.” All lies.

Trump’s “machine gun” will appear on across various shows and time blocks on the right-wing network, using her voice and institutional legitimacy to push what will likely be an unapologetically pro-Trump agenda.

Just nowWalter EinenkelChild abuser Dennis Hastert has diedThe disgraced former Republican House speaker, died over the weekend at 84. Hastert was sentenced to 15 months in prison for illegally structuring bank withdrawals to hide hush money payments meant to cover up his sexual abuse of a former student. Hastert sexually molested an unspecified number of boys while he was a teacher and wrestling…

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In a leaked audio recording, Texas Attorney General and Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton lamented that he isn’t in control of his own campaign. 

At a fundraiser in September, Paxton spoke candidly about his flailing campaign, according to the recording shared with Politico and published Monday.  

“I’ve never been in a race where I felt less control over the campaign and, like, what issues are going to matter because it’s all coming—you know—from D.C.,” he said. “I don’t control the message or what we’re doing.

“I don’t have ability to change anything,” Paxton continued. “So I have to live with whatever I’ve got. So it is a challenge.”

The audio was leaked by someone who does not support Paxton, and confirmed by another attendee. One attendee said that Paxton never specifically referred to Donald Trump’s team. Nick Maddux, Paxton’s campaign adviser, said that the candidate was “obviously” referring to the fact that campaigns don’t coordinate with super PACs. 

Trump has repeatedly pledged his desire to see Paxton elected but hesitated to commit any part of his $400 million MAGA Inc. war chest to help him win. Instead, Trump has focused on making the midterm elections a referendum on his own presidency. Last month, Trump held a fundraiser in Houston that was touted as a lifeline to Paxton’s campaign—but the money actually went to the Republican National Convention, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

Paxton has long struggled to match Democratic candidate James Talarico’s funding. According to their latest quarterly filings with the Federal Election Commission, Talarico’s campaign had raked in $31.6 million, while Paxton only raised $9.3 million. The latest New York Times/Sienna poll found that Paxton was six points behind Talarico. 

This is the second piece of audio leaked about Paxton. Last month, the attorney general was caught trashing Trump’s disastrous midterm convention.

The Trump administration is watching Brazil’s presidential election results closely.

Over the weekend, right-wing candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, a son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and President Trump’s preferred candidate, advanced to a runoff with incumbent President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a leftist.

The White House has done all it can to boost Bolsonaro and cement Trump’s influence over Latin America. Trump has backed conservative allies in Colombia as well as Argentina and kidnapped Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro. The day after Maduro was brought to the U.S., in January, the State Department posted a picture on social media with Trump and the slogan, “This is OUR hemisphere.”

In total, seven right-wing candidates have won presidential elections across Latin America in the last 18 months, with Trump publicly backing most of them.

“We’re doing very well in South America,” Trump said in September. “Lots of people that I got elected.”

Trump was a strong supporter of the elder Bolsonaro, and they share some odious similarities. Bolsonaro refused to accept losing Brazil’s 2022 elections to Lula, and his supporters stormed government buildings in response. Unlike in the U.S., Bolsonaro and his allies were arrested and put on trial for the coup attempt, with investigators uncovering a plot to kill Lula and his running mate.

Trump’s response was to threaten the country with exorbitant tariffs over the “witch hunt,” as he put it, in July 2025. Undeterred, Lula went ahead with Bolsonaro’s trial and the former president was convicted and sentenced to 27 years in prison. In May this year, Lula and Trump had a frosty meeting with no cameras at the White House. Then, as elections neared, Trump dispatched two State Department officials to investigate “electoral integrity,” only for Brazil to deny their visas and accuse them of interfering in the country’s elections.

Lula used Trump’s efforts in his reelection campaign, accusing Flávio Bolsonaro of being “Trump’s candidate,” and called out Trump at the United Nations General Assembly last month. It remains to be seen whether those efforts will help Lula to win the October 29 runoff.

Two recent polls show that the majority of Latino voters have all but abandoned President Trump—reaffirming a development that’s been brewing since he returned to office and began his draconian immigration crackdown.

The new NBC News/Telemundo poll has Latinos going for Democrats by a margin of 59 percent in the upcoming midterm elections, almost doubling their support from 2024. The new CBS News/YouGov poll tells a similar story, with 60 percent of Latino voters preferring Democratic House candidates. Overall, 69 percent of Latino voters disapprove of President Trump’s performance ahead of the midterms.

This comes two years after Trump won a groundbreaking 42 percent of them, sparking discourse about a new multicultural Republican coalition. That dream seems to be all but dead, as those same voters have responded extremely negatively to Trump’s handling of the economy, his lack of action on the affordability crisis, and his mass deportation campaign.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that these voters will automatically turn out for Democrats now—more Latinos (42 percent) still have a negative view of the party, as it has not fully taken advantage of two years of violent arrests, kidnappings, shootings, pepper balls, and killings.

Democrats are riding high on what feels like an endless wave of good polling ahead of November’s midterm elections. The party is widely expected to win control of the House, if not also the Senate. But there are a handful of races where the polling hasn’t been so kind, and Democrats shouldn’t let their justified giddiness about punishing President Donald Trump and the Republican Party cloud…

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People, especially women, are stressed about paying for everything, from groceries and housing to healthcare and retirement, according to new polling from The 19th and YouGov. This story was originally reported by Mariel Padilla and Grace Panetta of The 19th. Meet Mariel and Grace and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy. High prices and the cost of living are…

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As always, if you find value in this work I do, please consider helping me keep it sustainable by joining my weekly newsletter, Sparky’s List! You can get it in your inbox or read it on Patreon, the content is the same. Also, if you missed the big Kickstarter, there are still some copies of the latest book, Our Long National Nightmare, available on the Tom Tomorrow popup store! (Don’t delay…

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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the October 5 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

A new Fox News poll finds James Talarico up seven points over Ken Paxton in Texas. It’s such a shocker that it induced Fox figures to panic right on the air. But what’s striking about this poll is what it says about Trump and Republicans, and how Texas captures what’s happening with the MAGA movement as Trump sunsets. Also telling is how this comes as Republicans are moving around their Senate spending in ways that reveal what they think of their own plight at this very moment.

We’re talking about all of it with political theorist Alan Elrod, who had a great piece for Liberal Currents on Texas Republicans as representative of the Trump-era GOP. Alan, great to have you on.

Alan Elrod: Good to be back.

Sargent: So the new Fox poll finds Talarico up by seven points among registered voters in Texas, 53 to 46, and up two points among likely voters, 51 to 49. I think his lead is probably somewhere in the middle there. But critically, the Fox poll finds Trump’s approval at 44 percent to 55 percent disapproving.

He’s eleven points underwater in a state he carried by 14 points only two years ago. Alan, you have some experience with Texas personally. How surprising is that Fox finding?

Elrod: Yeah, it’s true, my wife is a Texan. She’s from Fort Worth. You know, I think the interesting thing about the finding is that it points at a number of the groups that are frustrated with the second Trump administration, right? Texas does have a lot of Latinos who are jilted—some of them who voted for Trump, some of them who didn’t, but a lot of whom are very frustrated on immigration.

It has a lot of conservative Christians, but there’s also a lot of moderate and progressive Christians in Texas who are angry with Trump for different reasons. And then there’s just the, I think, broader problem of the Texas GOP and some of its candidate selection issues that gloms onto Texas politics in general at the moment.

Sargent: Well, those non-MAGA Christians are going to loom large in this discussion, so let’s put a pin in that. Fox anchor Ainsley Earhardt was so shocked by these findings. Listen to this exchange between her and Fox contributor Clay Travis.

Ainsley Earhardt (voiceover): If you look at that Fox News poll, he’s ahead by seven points in the state of Texas. How is that possible?

Clay Travis (voiceover): Texans have to wake up. I think sometimes when you have seen Republicans win for generations, a lot of people out there just don’t think at all that Democrats are capable of winning in the state. Now, I watch a lot of football, I watch a lot of sports. Every single game that I am watching, I am seeing Republican ads dominating. I think that Republicans have held their proverbial, you know, cash until the last moment, and they now are delivering overwhelming amounts of dollars into the playing field.

Sargent: Alan, note how she says, how on earth can this be happening? And the answer she gets back is, don’t worry, Republican money will bail out Paxton. All that cash going to ads to reach the football demographic. Like, those are the people who should be there for Republicans, but really need to be re-energized behind Trump and today’s Texas GOP. I thought that was telling. What do you think?

Elrod: So I don’t want to pretend that I have no fear of big spending close to the election, but Travis is just avoiding the key problem, which is Paxton. The problem is Paxton. Paxton is a terrible candidate. He’s hated by a lot of people in his own party. I mean, 60 members of his own party voted to impeach him a few years ago. So we’re not talking about a guy that is beloved across the state.

And so, you know, when we look at this, I think one of the encouraging signs is, hey, actually, you can find candidates that are so bad, and on the other side you can find candidates that are so kind of perfectly built for the moment, that you can put those things together and get a potential big win in a state like Texas.

Now, we’re not there yet, right? Signs and polls don’t vote. But what we’re seeing is that candidates still do matter sometimes, and we’re getting good indicators that it is important that the Democrats nominated Talarico, and it is relevant that the Republicans nominated Paxton.

Sargent: Yeah, I mean, this race is on a knife’s edge, let’s face it. And the money is going to be a big deal. They’re going to put a lot of money in there. But let’s talk about Paxton and the Republican Party. He’s sort of like the perfect exemplar of the Texas GOP. And in order to set up the rest of this discussion, let’s talk about what the Texas Republican Party actually is.

You had a great piece on this stressing how the Texas GOP’s white male Christian supremacy and naked ethnonationalism are the future of the Republican Party now that Trump has reshaped it. Talk about that.

Elrod: The argument in this piece is that that’s something that we should both, I think, see a bit of a silver lining in, and also be very concerned about, because the politics are very nasty. They’re corrupt, they’re hateful. They’re very, very nasty.

On the other hand, I think what you’re seeing with the Talarico race is some of the consequences of those politics, right? Ken Paxton is a criminal. He has been under investigation for securities fraud. He is a philanderer who then turns around and tries to castigate Democrats on moral issues. He has waged a really aggressive campaign against trans kids in Texas, going so far as to try to level sort of legal intimidation at places like Seattle Children’s Hospital in Washington, because he’s so determined to try to prevent any form of care for trans kids.

Abbott is running for an unprecedented fourth term. There’s been all the kind of stuff at the border with putting razor wire in the Rio Grande. I mean, these are people who I think have lost the plot.

And it is an example of both the dangers, I think, of our politics. We are headed in a direction where what comes after Trump, I think, is going to be a lot like what we’re seeing in Texas. It’s going to be even nastier, it’s going to be even more corrupt, it’s going to be even more hateful. At the same time, the window is there. You can lose people by behaving this way. And Texas GOP is showing that.

Sargent: And I want to pick up your point about how this kind of opens up a window for making a case to some of these voters that they should peel away from the Republican Party. And the Fox polling actually gets at this. Trump’s approval is underwater in Texas with working-class voters, who are supposedly his base, and even deeper underwater with Latinos, at 38 percent approval to 61 percent disapproval.

Alan, in the mythic version of Trumpism, which was supposed to be a multiracial working-class movement, Latinos were going to be permanently brought into the Trump coalition because they’re culturally conservative and they see the economy as being lifted by Trump.

But of course, what happened in the real world is what the Texas Republican Party has become. The ethnonationalism and the violence helped drive these people away. Doesn’t that sort of get at your thesis a little bit, those findings?

Elrod: Absolutely. I mean, I think what we’re seeing here is, from the racial hatred to the stupidity of things like the tariffs, if you hurt people enough, they will potentially eventually abandon you. You cannot just keep hurting them over and over again and expect loyalty. That does eventually matter.

Now, the people who will stick it out are the people who might feel like they’re getting something in return for that, or the people who feel like they’re the group that gets to hurt everybody else. But that’s a much smaller pool of people than everybody else in Texas. And Texas is a big state.

People don’t, I think, remember this all the time. They know it’s big physically. But Houston is one of the most diverse cities in the country. Texas itself is wildly economically, religiously, culturally diverse. So if you try to wage war on all these different subsets of America, that’s going to be felt in a place like Texas.

Sargent: Well, it gets even more striking with this data. In the Fox poll, Trump is even underwater with Republicans who don’t identify as MAGA—non-MAGA Republicans—at 46 percent approval to 53 percent disapproval. Those are Republicans, Alan. And only 50 percent of that demographic, non-MAGA Republicans, are extremely interested in the election, and that’s lower than other groups—lower than Texas voters overall, lower than Democrats, et cetera, et cetera.

So I think there you see the dynamic that you were talking about, in which kind of non-MAGA Christians in Texas just aren’t willing to go along with what this movement has really become. I mean, they’re not interested in voting for who Trump is telling them to vote for.

Elrod: Absolutely. I mean, there are MAGA Christians all over America who simply come to whatever position or justification they have, even biblical ones, from the starting point of, I do what Trump says, I vote how Trump wants, I say what Trump says. But there are actually a lot of other Christians who are frustrated. And I see this in my own communities here in Arkansas, which is next door. It’s not like you can treat American Christians as this one giant lump, and plenty of them are quite worn out.

It is hard to get people to buy into constant displays of public cruelty, right? That is very different. When you’re trying to nibble around the edges on this stuff, and when you’re sort of being, I think, opaque about the really vicious parts of your policy, and you’re using more maybe sort of sleight-of-hand talking points about how we need border security, you might get people to go along.

But when they’re turning on the TV and seeing that people are being murdered by our own government, by DHS, and then that the Trump administration basically seems to take pleasure in that, that is going to turn off a big middle of Christians who may have otherwise not been activated. Now, we may have wished they would have been activated before this, but that is where we are now.

Sargent: Right. I think you’re putting your finger on something important here about MAGA, right? Which is that the violent ethnic purges, the violent ethnic cleansing, is a feature of the movement. It absolutely saturates official government propaganda about immigrants. It saturates ICE’s recruitment.

ICE’s recruitment is literally, you get to participate in a violent purge. That’s the selling point. If you become an ICE agent, you get to participate in this kind of violent cleansing of America. And it’s like, you will be part of something bigger and higher. That’s what MAGA is. And there just does seem to be a segment of conservative Christians that isn’t there. Is that overly optimistic, though?

Elrod: Well, I think my message in my piece is, you know, I said it’s a warning and it’s a silver lining, but the warning isn’t just to the country as a whole. It’s also, I think, to these sort of self-styled non-MAGA Republicans, which is to say, guys, this isn’t your party anymore. What does it even mean to say you’re a non-MAGA Republican? That’s not a thing anymore. You need to embrace, I think, supporting Democrats for the next few cycles at least. And I think we should just be comfortable trying to say that.

Sargent: I think there’s another development which actually underscores your point quite well, which is that the Senate Leadership Fund, which is a major GOP super PAC, just pulled its spending out of North Carolina, essentially ceding that Senate race, where Democrat Roy Cooper seems to be up. SLF is now putting more money into the Kansas Senate race, of all things. And I think this is really sort of indicative of the phenomenon that you’re identifying.

Adam Hamilton, the Democratic candidate in Kansas, is a pastor. He’s religious. He speaks about his faith. He’s written books about his faith. And so all of a sudden, there does seem to be an opening being created by MAGA extremism to try and appeal to some of these middle-of-the-road religious voters. That’s happening in Texas as well. James Talarico talks about his faith openly. Can you talk about these dynamics?

Elrod: I think at the core of this is, people want to connect with candidates that are coming from a place that they can relate to. And the reality is that a lot of Americans, whether it’s Protestant Christianity or some other affiliation, have some form of faith. And I think people hear candidates talking openly about their faith, and what they hear is, I know people like this. This person is someone I can relate to. This person is being honest, I think, about their own limitations.

And I don’t want to suggest that you can’t do those things and be an atheist candidate. You can. But I think when Democrats spent a little while running away from talking about faith, what they actually did was just make themselves seem sort of unrelatable, and maybe judgmental in a way that I don’t think they maybe meant to. I think some of it was rooted in, we don’t want to seem exclusionary by talking about things like Christian faith.

When in reality, I think what people are drawn to is not sort of one-to-one theological agreement, but a sense of honest and humble striving. Because that’s what a lot of people think about when they think about their faith. They think about their own imperfections. They think about the things in their life that their faith has gotten them through. They think about the things in their life that they’re grateful for.

And I think that’s what people really need to hear from candidates—candidates who feel like they are speaking to the totality of their life experience. And if it feels like you’re hiding some part of yourself away, or you’re unwilling to talk about some frankly huge chunk of what life is about to a lot of Americans because you’re worried about stepping on it the wrong way, then what you’re doing is losing out on a chance to connect with people.

Sargent: Yeah, and I think there’s another dimension to this as well, which is that when James Talarico talks about his faith, or Adam Hamilton does, what they’re essentially saying is that there’s a place in this party for other people of faith.

And that’s an important message if you’re going to win in a place like Texas or a place like Kansas, right? I mean, these are red states. You are not going to win unless you’re able to win over a segment of Republican voters.

And I just wonder whether what we’re seeing here is the kind of development of a new kind of politics for Democrats, a politics that’s very well suited to the kind of moral collapse and moral depravity of what I keep calling Late-Stage Trumpism. Does that seem like it could be happening?

Elrod: Yes. And to that point, I would say people need to be watching very closely Andy Beshear. Andy Beshear from Kentucky is almost certainly going to be a candidate in the 2028 cycle. And his messaging around this stuff is exactly right.

What I love about Andy is that after he vetoed those anti-trans bills in Kentucky, his argument was faith-centric. He said, all children are children of God, and I don’t believe in bullying kids. And then he followed it up very, I think, effectively by saying, also, I don’t think government should be regulating local sports. That’s for communities and schools and families to decide.

But that key thing of, we are all children of God, and I don’t believe in demeaning or making any person who is a child of God feel attacked—that’s incredibly powerful. I think Beshear, even maybe more than Talarico, has just got it figured out on this stuff. And I think he’s going to be a very, very compelling person to watch.

Sargent: I’m glad you raised that message from Beshear, because I think what we’re now seeing is Democrats kind of returning a little bit to this idea of Christianity as equality before God. When James Talarico says that his faith requires him to treat the stranger well, or the neighbor well, he’s basically making a variation on the point that Beshear made about trans people.

Now, I know that people will get mad at this, and yes, I wish James Talarico would figure out where he stands on trans issues a little better. But generally speaking, he’s been very good on immigration. And I do think the through line to all this is this return to a kind of Christian message of equality before God.

Is that what we’re seeing here? And is there kind of an opening here for a broader values-based Democratic coalition that the kind of corruption and depravity and collapse of late-stage Trumpism has created?

Elrod: Absolutely. And I would say this. Christianity is just deeply interwoven into liberalism. And by that I mean, like, small-l liberal—it doesn’t have to be progressive or left—but the universal ideas of Christianity, especially things that come later, the Protestant Reformation, the idea of the priesthood of all believers, this idea that we have equality before God, that we are individuals with equal worth and merit and dignity striving together.

I mean, these are fundamentally Christian ideas that are also really, really rooted in the liberal revolution that comes in the early modern period and onward.

In fact, I think we should embrace the idea that Christianity does not have to be—and this is something that a lot of people on the left side of center make the mistake of doing, which is assuming Christianity has to be a kind of reactionary, regressive thing—when in fact it can be a powerfully liberating and leveling and unifying idea. And it comes in history in many cases, in many points in history, as a liberating and universalizing force and not an oppressive one.

Sargent: Where do you see the Republican Party going? Does the future essentially hold a Texified, if you will, Republican Party? And is that going to be something that’s, you know, a little bit more of a rump, potentially? Or are they going to be able to figure out how to get past Trump and Trumpism and kind of reconstitute something more like a previously existing Republican Party?

Elrod: No, the near-to-medium-term future is a Texified party. And as far as it being a rump, it’s up to us to make it a rump. It won’t be a rump unless we fight to make it one.

And it’s only once we do that, once the party is essentially razed to the ground through electoral defeat after electoral defeat, that there’s a chance you have something different and better on the other side.

Sargent: And James Talarico’s theory of the case, which is that you need this very broad coalition in order to defeat Republicans in Texas, is kind of a way of saying that we have to turn the Republican Party into a MAGA rump. That’s what he’s saying, isn’t he?

Elrod: Absolutely. And this is why I go back to some of the lessons I took from Hungary earlier in the year, with, you know, Péter Magyar basically said the same thing. You have to build a massive coalition against this stuff, and you have to deliver overwhelming defeat. And then you can start to build a program of reconstruction on top of it.

Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you, Alan, big things could be happening now. I guess we’ll know more in around a month. But man, Talarico and these other candidates really have to close this thing out, don’t they?

Elrod: They do. They do. Got to get across the finish line.

Sargent: Folks, make sure to check out Alan Elrod’s piece. It’s called “The Future of the Republican Party After Trump Is in Texas.” And it sure looks that way. Alan, a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much.

Elrod: Thanks for having me.

For several days this spring, trapped inside a Texas immigration detention center, Luis made frantic phone calls, one after the other, to everyone he could think of.

Could anyone help him find his 11-year-old son?

He’d last seen Andrés, a sensitive boy who likes to draw and paint, at an ICE holding facility near Camp East Montana, the sprawling detention center on a military base in El Paso where Luis now found himself.

Luis and Andrés had come to the United States from Venezuela in 2023. They were taken into custody together this past April after Luis, a construction worker, was arrested by federal agents outside his home. For hours, he and Andrés sat alone in a cell that felt to them like a dungeon. Around midnight, ICE officers showed up and ordered the boy to come with them.

No, Luis had pleaded. Andrés was just a kid—he needed his dad. But the officers seemed unmoved, he said, slipping on gloves and tugging on the boy’s arms as father and son clung to one another. Luis recalled that the officers promised Andrés would be in touch with him, so he let go and watched them take him away.

The administration’s goal in detaining these children, a former ORR official says , is “to make sure no one ever sends their kids to the US again.”

Three days had since gone by without a word, and Luis was in a state of panic. Neither he nor his family on the outside—Andrés’ mother and stepmom—could get any information on the child’s whereabouts. Worse, there was no sign of Andrés in ICE’s online detainee locator. Where had they taken him?

“Since he was little he’s been with me,” Luis told us later from detention, his voice filled with anguish. (Luis and Andrés are pseudonyms, and other family members’ names were changed to protect their privacy. Some attorneys who spoke with us also requested anonymity, in order to describe cases without exposing their clients.)

The Camp East Montana immigrant detention center, a series of hardened tents, is located at an Army base on the outskirts of El Paso, Texas.Morgan Lee/AP

Finally, after about five days, Luis learned that ICE had transferred Andrés to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that cares for “unaccompanied” migrant children. Federal law defines unaccompanied minors as kids younger than 18 with no lawful immigration status and no parent or guardian in the United States available to care for them.

In the past, most unaccompanied minors in ORR custody were children who had recently crossed the US-Mexico border by themselves—not kids who arrived with a parent and had been living in the country for years. Andrés was never unaccompanied, but ICE confusingly labeled him that way. As a result, Luis learned, ORR would place him in temporary foster care with another Texas family.

Andrés felt betrayed, as a lawyer who later took his case recalled to us. “He was saying, ‘The government lied to me. I asked them to be with my dad, and they took us to a place, and we were separated.’”

Luis, stuck in detention, could not believe it. “You tricked me!” he thought angrily of ICE.

“You kidnapped my son.”

If this sounds familiar, it’s because something similar happened during the first Trump administration. In 2018, under the so-called zero tolerance policy, immigration agents tore families apart as they crossed the US-Mexico border, detaining parents and transferring their children to ORR custody. One of ORR’s responsibilities is to place unaccompanied kids in shelters, group homes, or foster care until they can be released to sponsors, who are often relatives. Historically, these arrangements were never intended for children who arrived with parents, but Trump’s advisers wagered that separating families would deter new migrants from making the trip. The zero-tolerance policy made national headlines and was denounced on both sides of the political aisle as inhumane, and a federal court eventually ruled it illegal.

Yet now, eight years later, the Trump administration is again separating families, except this time it’s doing so more quietly, and away from the border: Federal agents have picked up hundreds of immigrant children in the interior of the country and sent them to ORR, a vast departure from prior administrations, when interior referrals to the agency were rare. Anywhere from 500 to more than 700 of these kids, according to sources familiar with the cases, had previously crossed the border alone and spent time in ORR custody, but were living with their sponsors when ICE returned them to the agency. These “re-referrals” are the subject of lawsuits and investigations.

But there’s another group of kids that has received less attention—kids like Andrés who were sent to ORR even though they were never unaccompanied. It’s unclear how many children fall into this category, because ORR doesn’t systematically track them, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ignored our questions about them. But a source with knowledge of federal immigration data told us they now make up a “huge chunk” of ORR’s caseload.

We spoke with more than a dozen attorneys for this story who confirmed this trend, and were alarmed by it. “It’s confusing why those kids are being deemed unaccompanied,” says Diane de Gramont, also with the National Center for Youth Law, who recently raised this concern in court.

“We’re talking about kids who have a mom, a dad, and siblings who want them to be living with them,” says Jessica Richardson, an attorney who works with The Door, a New York nonprofit that helps detained minors. “They don’t want them to be in the shelter, and there’s absolutely no reason why they can’t go home to their families.”

Children wait outside of an immigration court at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in New York City. Michael M. Santiago/Getty

It’s “family separation,” says Becky Wolozin, another attorney from the National Center for Youth Law, who notes that some of the children are as young as 8.

The administration is, in effect, creating unaccompanied minors. “They’re kidnapping people’s kids and keeping them in government custody,” says Jen Smyers, who served as ORR’s deputy director during the Biden administration. And why? It’s part of a “longer-term vision,” she suspects, “to make sure no one ever sends their kids to the US again.” And, other attorneys add, to deport those already here.

Andrés had been separated from his dad for days and was trying to be brave when an ORR social worker handed him the phone. It was his stepmom, Mariana.

She’d been searching for the 11-year-old all week, worried sick, when the agency finally let her know his whereabouts. “How are you?” she asked Andrés in the recorded call, which we translated from Spanish. “How are they treating you? Have you eaten?”

“It’s a particularly heartbreaking conversation,” says Michelle Brané, a renowned immigration expert who tried to help the family locate Andrés, “more for what he doesn’t say than for what he does.”

Andrés didn’t tell Mariana he was scared, for example. And he didn’t ask the kinds of questions one might expect, like “Where’s Dad?” or “What’s going on?” He didn’t talk much at all beyond reassuring her, that yes, he was behaving, and yes, they gave him food, and he had showered. When she asked if he had been crying, he said no.

“I feel imprisoned and very closed in here,” said a 16-year-old girl in ORR custody in Texas. “We cannot touch each other, we cannot hug, we cannot share food.”

“You’ll be with us soon,” she told him.

“He’s in survival mode,” says Brané, “a sweet little 11-year-old’s voice saying he’s strong and he’ll do what they tell him.”

Mariana wondered why Andrés hadn’t called sooner, and he said he wanted to, but they wouldn’t per let him. “They told you that?” she asked. He confirmed it, without specifying whom he was referring to. He did have one question: Could he see his baby brother? Mariana switched to a video call and pointed the camera toward the baby. “He doesn’t recognize me,” Andrés said quietly.

Andrés had met Mariana after he and his dad came to the United States and settled in El Paso. She was a recent immigrant from Colombia and had started dating Luis, who’d fled Venezuela, she said, because he supported the political opposition and faced threats. Luis was one of more than 600,000 Venezuelans with Temporary Protected Status, a humanitarian designation for people whose countries the government deems too dangerous to return to. (Andrés’ mom lives in Colombia.) Luis found a construction job, and he and Mariana had a baby in 2025. But that fall, the Supreme Court let President Trump revoke TPS for Venezuelans.

Luis and Andrés were at home the afternoon they were arrested. The boy was playing outside with friends, and Luis was just heading out to give an estimate on a construction job when SUVs blocked him in the driveway. Mariana walked out to see what was happening and saw masked ICE agents with guns.

She demanded a warrant, but the officers would not show her one. Luis had missed an immigration court hearing, they claimed, an allegation the family denies. Then, she recalls, an officer looked at Andrés and the baby in her arms, and asked whether Luis was their dad. When she said yes, the officers said they couldn’t take an infant born in the United States. But they loaded Andrés into a vehicle with his father as Luis cried for help.

And then they drove away.

Andrés and Luis were arrested together, but Trump’s ICE agents often deem children unaccompanied after encountering them alone in the community. In one case in Texas, a 15-year-old boy with an intellectual disability wandered away from his mom’s fruit stand to find a bathroom. When he didn’t return, she searched for him all over before reporting him missing. Authorities found him the next day but didn’t realize he was the same boy and failed to locate a legal guardian. They contacted ICE, which sent him to ORR. He stayed in the agency’s care for 48 days, even as his mother pleaded for his release, and even after he developed appendicitis and was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery.

Some kids are sent to ORR simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. That was true for a 13-year-old girl in Pennsylvania who, after law enforcement encountered her at the scene of someone else’s arrest, was placed in ORR custody in New York and Texas for more than a year, even though she’d been living with her family when she was detained, according to an attorney who worked on the case.

Many others have been sent back to ORR after being accused of a minor crime like shoplifting, smoking, or fishing without a license. “If the child were a US citizen,” says Jennifer Vanegas, an attorney at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, “the police would call the kid’s parents and send them home.”

DHS lists these petty infractions as reasons to re-refer children to ORR, but the justification is often pretextual, according to another source with knowledge of the cases. Charges are usually dismissed once the child is transferred to a shelter. “You could see a pattern: They were trying to find literally any basis to force an encounter with the child, seemingly fabricate or exaggerate the encounter, use that as the basis to take them into DHS custody, refer them to ORR, and then dismiss that charge,” the source noted. (DHS directed all questions involving ORR to Health and Human Services.)

ICE has been arresting guardians who show up to complete sponsorship requirements: “They are using the children as bait.”

As in Andrés’ case, parents aren’t always notified promptly that their child was transferred to ORR. An Ecuadorian father in Minneapolis “was horribly distraught” after his teenager didn’t come home in January, according to his attorney, Claire Glenn. The teen had called to tell his dad he was being arrested by ICE, but the agency claimed it didn’t know where he was. “I did not know whether ICE was lying or mistaken, or whether I had a very different case on my hand of a child that had been abducted by people who were impersonating ICE and perhaps were trafficking children,” Glenn says. She asked an investigator to locate the kid. It turned out he’d been sent to an ORR shelter in Michigan, even though he, like Andrés, came to the United States with his dad and was never unaccompanied.

In another case, a teen told ICE officers he lived with his dad down the block, but that his dad was deaf. They didn’t try to contact the father before sending his kid to ORR, according to an advocate. “There is a parent down the road, waiting for their child to come home,” says Kara Finck, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who was speaking about such cases in general. “To think that simply because your child is an immigrant, they can be declared unaccompanied and not returned to your care is a real assault on the very basic principles and tenets of family autonomy.”

Kids will say, “‘I told them my dad was at work a mile away or my mom was at home,” but the officers “don’t care,” former ORR deputy director Smyers told us.

When authorities do reach out, it can come with a risk. Last year, Mileidy Yamaly Contreras Flores got a call from the police department in Chelsea, Massachusetts. It was her 15-year-old son, who had immigrated with her from Honduras in 2019. He’d been in a fight and gotten arrested, and he needed an adult to pick him up at the station. Her husband went—and was detained by ICE after he arrived, according to a subsequent lawsuit. The teen was then sent to ORR in another state. By the time the suit was filed, he had been separated from his family for nearly seven months.

ICE initially sent Andrés out of state, too; he stayed in several hotel rooms in Arizona, according to a legal filing, before officers brought him back to Texas. It was determined he would live with a foster family but spend his days at an ORR shelter and attend school there.

Mariana could not understand why the government labeled her stepson unaccompanied. “The child was never alone,” she said.

Attorney and former Georgia state representative Stacey Abrams speaks at a vigil near the US Capitol calling for an end to ICE child and family detention.Leigh Vogel/Free Famlies Coalition/Getty

DHS wouldn’t answer questions about how it makes such determinations or decides to separate immigrant parents and children instead of keeping them together in family detention. Asked about claims that the administration is “kidnapping” immigrant children, a spokesperson insisted: “ICE does not separate families.”

ORR said Andrés would remain in its care while officials carried out “the family reunification process,” but that process dragged on. In May, Andrés’ lawyer Kristin Etter asked a federal court to order his release, arguing that he was unlawfully detained. “[He] should not have been designated as an unaccompanied child because he was encountered together with his father and his stepmother,” she wrote in the petition. Family separation was unnecessary, Etter argued.

The boy and his family waited for the court to weigh in.

There are fewer unaccompanied minors in federal custody now than in the past. That’s largely because not as many kids have been entering the United States by themselves. ORR received just 3,500 referrals from July 2025 through May 2026, according to a source familiar with the data. But a record number of these children are being referred by ICE, an agency that in the past hasn’t sent many kids to ORR, at least compared with US Customs and Border Protection. As a result, the share of referrals from the nation’s interior, rather than the border—kids like Andrés who are already settled into American life—has increased dramatically.

Jonathan White, who managed ORR’s unaccompanied children program in 2017, says interior referrals represented between 3 and 5 percent of total referrals to the agency during the Obama administration and the first Trump administration. They were also “very rare” under Biden, Smyers says. But from July 2025 through May 2026, interior referrals were about 20 percent of the total, according to the source familiar with the data. Many of the attorneys we interviewed believe the shift from border to interior referrals has only grown more pronounced since then, and that interior referrals now make up about half of all new ORR cases.

This change matters enormously, advocates say, because the government’s shelter system wasn’t designed for children who are already settled in the United States. ORR staffers, too, are concerned, according to a source with knowledge of the situation: “I think most people agree that it’s only hurting kids and hurting families and not at all part of ORR’s central mission.”

Although federal law requires that minors be placed in the “least restrictive setting possible,” ORR’s shelters often have a carceral feel. The kids have to wear approved clothing, any valuables they have are confiscated, and they are allowed to eat and shower only at designated times. “I feel imprisoned and very closed in here,” a 16-year-old girl being held in a Texas ORR shelter said in a sworn legal declaration. “We cannot touch each other, we cannot hug, we cannot share food.”

“We’re putting them in prisons, essentially,” says attorney Richardson.

A young person who just crossed the border alone benefits from a bed and the chance to see a doctor, Smyers told us, but the “Americanized” immigrant kids experience a kind of culture shock when they’re detained. Instead of studying algebra or world history, as they would at their regular school, they might have to sit through ORR lessons on how to tell time, or how to name fruits and vegetables in English.

Children are also being held in custody longer. The average stay in ORR has increased from about one month under President Biden to roughly six months under Trump, according to the agency’s own data, and some kids are locked up for more than a year. ORR shelters are not equipped for long-term care, Smyers says, and children are struggling with their mental health. Suicidal ideation and behavioral problems are increasingly common, according to Smyers, attorneys who represent kids in ORR care, and other sources familiar with the agency’s work.

It is “the same routine every day,” says Alexa Sendukas, a Texas attorney who represents unaccompanied children. It’s “incredibly stressful and confusing, especially for the little ones. They don’t understand why they can’t get out.”

Attorneys blame Trump’s policy changes for the longer stays. Relatives can apply to sponsor the kids and bring them home, but the administration has made the application process more arduous, narrowing the types of accepted identification and proof-of-address documents, and requiring potential sponsors to attend in-person appointments. When children are re-referred, ORR requires their old sponsors—who were previously vetted and approved—to jump through these hoops too.

In a statement, ORR said the changes are intended to ensure that children are not placed with criminals. The Biden administration, “prioritized speed over safety,” a spokesperson said, resulting in “children being released to sponsors who abused, assaulted, or trafficked them.” DHS sent us a list of unnamed sponsors who it claimed had been arrested for domestic violence and other crimes. ORR is being “careful, not slow, because children’s lives are at stake,” the spokesperson added.

While some cases do raise legitimate welfare concerns, parents and guardians say the administration is depriving other children of homes that are perfectly safe.

Lawyers representing four children in shelters in Texas and New York who’d been re-referred to ORR sued the administration in February—the kids had been languishing in the agency’s care while their families tried, without success, to get them out. “These children have been forced to spend extremely long periods of time away from their family, friends, school, and community without justification,” their complaint reads.

It can be dangerous for guardians to try to get their children back. ORR shares information with ICE, which has arrested people who show up to complete fingerprinting and other sponsorship requirements. “They are using the children as bait,” Sendukas says. Fear can deter relatives from stepping up. The Acacia Center for Justice reported last year that releases from ORR to sponsors were “as low as they could possibly be.”

The new restrictions have “basically brought the entire [unaccompanied children] program to a halt,” says a source familiar with the situation. “Because sponsors can’t come forward, kids have nowhere else to go.” ORR, the source added, has become a “de-facto arm of DHS to facilitate their enforcement and detention mission.”

There’s a reason Congress placed ORR within HHS and not DHS. Namely, lawmakers didn’t think the agency overseeing the care of immigrant children should be the same one that handles enforcement and deportations. But those lines are now blurred.

Today, the administration offers teens it deems unaccompanied a payment of $2,500 or more if they’ll agree to leave the United States. Children also are given a handout that threatens lengthy detention and criminal prosecution of noncitizen parents should they take their case to court, as they are legally entitled to do. “You will be detained,” the memo promises, “for a prolonged period of time.”

The administration, Smyers says, is “scaring kids as a way to circumvent the law.”

Portions of a document the Trump administration gives some “unaccompanied” children.National Immigrant Justice Center court declaration

“They are putting in place all of these different pressure points to force kids out of this country without due process and without any protections,” concurs Melissa Adamson, a senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law.

All this appears to be part of a broader crackdown on immigrant children. Last year, the government tried to fly dozens of Guatemalan children from ORR shelters out of the country in the middle of the night, but a court intervened. ProPublica reported that unaccompanied minors have been detained and removed from the United States at three times the rate they were during Trump’s first term.

A federal judge found that even if Andrés wasn’t unaccompanied when ICE separated him from his dad and stepmom, he was unaccompanied now.

Making matters worse, immigrant children are contending with an acute shortage in legal representation. The administration recently ended a long-standing contract with an experienced nonprofit network that represented unaccompanied minors in court, handing the job instead to an organization founded by a former ICE agent. Increasingly, young children have been appearing before immigration judges without a lawyer.

“Donald Trump and his accomplices have directed every element of the federal government towards meeting their deportation quota, even if that means tearing families apart and traumatizing children,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the committee with jurisdiction over ORR, whose office is preparing a report about children in the agency’s care, told us in a statement. “Just like Trump’s first term, the cruelty is the point. The individuals responsible for flouting federal laws and harming children in the process will be held to account.”

In court last month, a Justice Department attorney said ORR has a responsibility to accept referrals from other federal agencies that have deemed a child unaccompanied. That determination, by definition, “means that the child has no parent available to provide care or custody in the United States,” the attorney said. 

But ORR officials don’t always agree with those assessments. Angie Salazar, the agency’s acting director, who came to ORR from ICE, has on occasion objected to classifying minors with a parent in the community as unaccompanied, according to a source familiar with internal deliberations. In a few cases, she has intervened personally, the source claimed, and demanded the child be released to their parent. But, Smyers points out, when there’s a disagreement, “unfortunately DHS normally wins.” (ORR and Salazar didn’t respond to a request for comment on this.)

A protester at Manhattan Civic Center, where federal agents detained immigration court respondents, displays a copy of the drawing made by a child held with her family in Dilley Detention Facility in Texas.Gina M. Randazzo/ZUMA

Andrés’ father was released from detention on bond a few months after his arrest. He would soon have to return to Venezuela. But Andrés remained stuck in foster care and was struggling. At one point, ORR caseworkers told the family he was unable to sleep, and screaming for his parents at night; a doctor suggested medication to help him rest, but Luis and Mariana didn’t want to approve pharmaceuticals because of his young age.

The caseworkers also told Mariana that Andrés had been acting out. Another boy who lived with the foster family complained that he wanted to be left alone, but that Andrés, lonely and looking for a friend, kept trying to hug him. “My son is suffering,” Luis told us. “He’s small. He needs his father.”

While Luis was still in detention, Andrés had called and “started crying, saying that he didn’t want to be there anymore, that he wanted to be with us already,” Mariana said. She’d tried to become his sponsor but couldn’t meet ORR’s new requirements because she lacked a taxpayer ID number, so she withdrew her application.

Eventually, Andrés took what seemed like the only route left: He asked an immigration judge to let him go back to Venezuela and be reunited with his biological mom, who said she could meet him at the airport. The judge granted him voluntary departure in July.

This didn’t mean he was free to leave ORR care right away. There had been earthquakes in Venezuela. It might take weeks or months to arrange his travel, and who would watch him in the meantime? A federal judge found that even if he wasn’t unaccompanied when ICE separated him from his dad and stepmom, he was unaccompanied now. He “does not have a parent or legal guardian in the United States who ‘is available to provide care and physical custody,’” the judge wrote in an order dismissing Andrés’ petition to leave foster care. “[W]ithout a sponsor, he cannot be released.”

And so, Andrés waited, counting the days until he could board a flight to Venezuela and be with a parent again. Finally, in August, more than three months after his apprehension, he was allowed to travel.

But when the plane landed in Barcelona, Venezuela, Andrés’ mother was nowhere to be found. The US government hadn’t told the family what time, or even what day, he would arrive. “We just had to give her our best guess,” says Etter, Andrés’ attorney.

After all the fanfare around vetting sponsors, supposedly for the safety of the children, no one in the administration had bothered to make sure an adult would be present to receive Andrés on the other end. He ended up waiting on the side of the road outside the airport until later that night, when Etter was able to help his mom locate him.

“They literally were gonna fly an 11-year-old boy by himself and just dump him in Venezuela,” she says. “They don’t really care who the kids are going home to, or what they’re going home to, just as long as they’re going home.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As free and abundant as sunlight may be, harnessing its power remains stubbornly difficult for homeowners. While the cost of solar energy has plummeted more than 90 percent in the last decade, panels remain a significant investment. And it’s not as easy as just slapping panels on a roof, as your home may need electrical upgrades too.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Countries like Germany have encouraged the proliferation of balcony solar, also known as plug-in solar: smaller, cheaper arrays that hook into a home’s electrical outlets. This offsets some of a residence’s energy use, saving users hundreds of dollars a year, and opens up solar energy to renters with balconies or backyards. As a bonus, the less power homes have to draw from the grid, the less stress they put on the system, especially during heat waves when everyone is running energy-hungry air conditioners.

This past Wednesday, California officially got in on the balcony-solar action as Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill allowing residents of the nation’s most populous state to adopt the technology. It joins a handful of states, like Utah and Maine, in seeing the potential of the technology to generate clean electricity and save residents money as energy costs rise.

“It’s really ideal to use renewable electricity exactly where it’s generated.”

“This technology is very important and very powerful,” state Senator Scott Wiener, who authored the legislation, said during a press conference Thursday. “And what this bill does is eliminate the massive barrier to people using plug-in solar, which is that you’d have to go and negotiate an interconnection agreement with PG&E or the other utility.”

The proliferation of plug-in solar marks a fundamental shift in how the electrical grid operates. Historically, utilities have generated electricity by burning fossil fuels like coal and natural gas. When demand rose, like when people returned home at the end of the day and switched on appliances, they’d just ramp up production. This kept the system in a sort of equilibrium, a constant balance of supply and demand.

That, though, doesn’t quite work the same with renewables like wind and solar. If demand is holding steady and the sun is setting, a utility isn’t generating as much electricity with its panels. Same with wind, if the skies suddenly calm. So in addition to building out wind and solar farms, utilities are deploying huge batteries to save that energy for later use. This creates a more flexible grid that can still hum with electricity when things are dark or calm.

This transformation is turning you, the consumer, into a more active participant in the grid. For years now, homes with solar have sent excess energy back to the grid. While plug-in solar might generate a fraction of what you’d get from a roof covered in panels, it can still help make the grid more flexible. Instead of feeding the system, it reduces the amount of electricity drawn from the grid. Scaled across a whole city, these small reductions can add up, offsetting some of the growth in demand from things like AI data centers and electrification. (Think induction stoves needing electricity instead of natural gas, and EVs charging instead of burning fuel.) 

“This is one of the most immediate, concrete, tangible, real, and affordable things that we can do to start to get control of our high energy costs, but also save our planet,” Bernadette Del Chiaro, senior vice president for California at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, said during the press conference. “So it’s really a twofer.”

Basically, plug-in solar could help reduce congestion in the system at peak times—when it’s hot out and everyone’s running their AC, there’s also plenty of sun to strike the panels. It’s turning homes and apartments into a distributed network of tiny power plants. “It’s really ideal to use renewable electricity exactly where it’s generated,” said Amanda Smith, a senior scientist focusing on the built environment at Project Drawdown, a climate solutions nonprofit. 

This increased interactivity in the grid comes as utility bills continue to skyrocket. Basic plug-in solar systems will set you back a few hundred dollars, and you can potentially make back that money with energy savings in around four years. (The higher the energy costs in your state, the quicker you’d get that return on your investment.) Still, for a lot of households, that’s a major investment, so ideally a state also provides rebates for people to adopt the technology. 

With California now aboard the plug-in solar train, your state may well follow. “The big reason this is a big deal really is because it’s the most affordable way for people to actually participate with solar PV,” Smith said. “Whatever happens in California is going to influence, I think, a lot of other future state markets. So it’s going to be a key one to watch.”

For several days this spring, trapped inside a Texas immigration detention center, Luis made frantic phone calls, one after the other, to everyone he could think of.

Could anyone help him find his 11-year-old son?

He’d last seen Andrés, a sensitive boy who likes to draw and paint, at an ICE holding facility near Camp East Montana, the sprawling detention center on a military base in El Paso where Luis now found himself.

Luis and Andrés had come to the United States from Venezuela in 2023. They were taken into custody together this past April after Luis, a construction worker, was arrested by federal agents outside his home. For hours, he and Andrés sat alone in a cell that felt to them like a dungeon. Around midnight, ICE officers showed up and ordered the boy to come with them.

No, Luis had pleaded. Andrés was just a kid—he needed his dad. But the officers seemed unmoved, he said, slipping on gloves and tugging on the boy’s arms as father and son clung to one another. Luis recalled that the officers promised Andrés would be in touch with him, so he let go and watched them take him away.

The administration’s goal in detaining these children, a former ORR official says , is “to make sure no one ever sends their kids to the US again.”

Three days had since gone by without a word, and Luis was in a state of panic. Neither he nor his family on the outside—Andrés’ mother and stepmom—could get any information on the child’s whereabouts. Worse, there was no sign of Andrés in ICE’s online detainee locator. Where had they taken him?

“Since he was little he’s been with me,” Luis told us later from detention, his voice filled with anguish. (Luis and Andrés are pseudonyms, and other family members’ names were changed to protect their privacy. Some attorneys who spoke with us also requested anonymity, in order to describe cases without exposing their clients.)

The Camp East Montana immigrant detention center, a series of hardened tents, is located at an Army base on the outskirts of El Paso, Texas.Morgan Lee/AP

Finally, after about five days, Luis learned that ICE had transferred Andrés to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that cares for “unaccompanied” migrant children. Federal law defines unaccompanied minors as kids younger than 18 with no lawful immigration status and no parent or guardian in the United States available to care for them.

In the past, most unaccompanied minors in ORR custody were children who had recently crossed the US-Mexico border by themselves—not kids who arrived with a parent and had been living in the country for years. Andrés was never unaccompanied, but ICE confusingly labeled him that way. As a result, Luis learned, ORR would place him in temporary foster care with another Texas family.

Andrés felt betrayed, as a lawyer who later took his case recalled to us. “He was saying, ‘The government lied to me. I asked them to be with my dad, and they took us to a place, and we were separated.’”

Luis, stuck in detention, could not believe it. “You tricked me!” he thought angrily of ICE.

“You kidnapped my son.”

If this sounds familiar, it’s because something similar happened during the first Trump administration. In 2018, under the so-called zero tolerance policy, immigration agents tore families apart as they crossed the US-Mexico border, detaining parents and transferring their children to ORR custody. One of ORR’s responsibilities is to place unaccompanied kids in shelters, group homes, or foster care until they can be released to sponsors, who are often relatives. Historically, these arrangements were never intended for children who arrived with parents, but Trump’s advisers wagered that separating families would deter new migrants from making the trip. The zero-tolerance policy made national headlines and was denounced on both sides of the political aisle as inhumane, and a federal court eventually ruled it illegal.

Yet now, eight years later, the Trump administration is again separating families, except this time it’s doing so more quietly, and away from the border: Federal agents have picked up hundreds of immigrant children in the interior of the country and sent them to ORR, a vast departure from prior administrations, when interior referrals to the agency were rare. Anywhere from 500 to more than 700 of these kids, according to sources familiar with the cases, had previously crossed the border alone and spent time in ORR custody, but were living with their sponsors when ICE returned them to the agency. These “re-referrals” are the subject of lawsuits and investigations.

But there’s another group of kids that has received less attention—kids like Andrés who were sent to ORR even though they were never unaccompanied. It’s unclear how many children fall into this category, because ORR doesn’t systematically track them, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ignored our questions about them. But a source with knowledge of federal immigration data told us they now make up a “huge chunk” of ORR’s caseload.

We spoke with more than a dozen attorneys for this story who confirmed this trend, and were alarmed by it. “It’s confusing why those kids are being deemed unaccompanied,” says Diane de Gramont, also with the National Center for Youth Law, who recently raised this concern in court.

“We’re talking about kids who have a mom, a dad, and siblings who want them to be living with them,” says Jessica Richardson, an attorney who works with The Door, a New York nonprofit that helps detained minors. “They don’t want them to be in the shelter, and there’s absolutely no reason why they can’t go home to their families.”

Children wait outside of an immigration court at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in New York City. Michael M. Santiago/Getty

It’s “family separation,” says Becky Wolozin, another attorney from the National Center for Youth Law, who notes that some of the children are as young as 8.

The administration is, in effect, creating unaccompanied minors. “They’re kidnapping people’s kids and keeping them in government custody,” says Jen Smyers, who served as ORR’s deputy director during the Biden administration. And why? It’s part of a “longer-term vision,” she suspects, “to make sure no one ever sends their kids to the US again.” And, other attorneys add, to deport those already here.

Andrés had been separated from his dad for days and was trying to be brave when an ORR social worker handed him the phone. It was his stepmom, Mariana.

She’d been searching for the 11-year-old all week, worried sick, when the agency finally let her know his whereabouts. “How are you?” she asked Andrés in the recorded call, which we translated from Spanish. “How are they treating you? Have you eaten?”

“It’s a particularly heartbreaking conversation,” says Michelle Brané, a renowned immigration expert who tried to help the family locate Andrés, “more for what he doesn’t say than for what he does.”

Andrés didn’t tell Mariana he was scared, for example. And he didn’t ask the kinds of questions one might expect, like “Where’s Dad?” or “What’s going on?” He didn’t talk much at all beyond reassuring her, that yes, he was behaving, and yes, they gave him food, and he had showered. When she asked if he had been crying, he said no.

“I feel imprisoned and very closed in here,” said a 16-year-old girl in ORR custody in Texas. “We cannot touch each other, we cannot hug, we cannot share food.”

“You’ll be with us soon,” she told him.

“He’s in survival mode,” says Brané, “a sweet little 11-year-old’s voice saying he’s strong and he’ll do what they tell him.”

Mariana wondered why Andrés hadn’t called sooner, and he said he wanted to, but they wouldn’t per let him. “They told you that?” she asked. He confirmed it, without specifying whom he was referring to. He did have one question: Could he see his baby brother? Mariana switched to a video call and pointed the camera toward the baby. “He doesn’t recognize me,” Andrés said quietly.

Andrés had met Mariana after he and his dad came to the United States and settled in El Paso. She was a recent immigrant from Colombia and had started dating Luis, who’d fled Venezuela, she said, because he supported the political opposition and faced threats. Luis was one of more than 600,000 Venezuelans with Temporary Protected Status, a humanitarian designation for people whose countries the government deems too dangerous to return to. (Andrés’ mom lives in Colombia.) Luis found a construction job, and he and Mariana had a baby in 2025. But that fall, the Supreme Court let President Trump revoke TPS for Venezuelans.

Luis and Andrés were at home the afternoon they were arrested. The boy was playing outside with friends, and Luis was just heading out to give an estimate on a construction job when SUVs blocked him in the driveway. Mariana walked out to see what was happening and saw masked ICE agents with guns.

She demanded a warrant, but the officers would not show her one. Luis had missed an immigration court hearing, they claimed, an allegation the family denies. Then, she recalls, an officer looked at Andrés and the baby in her arms, and asked whether Luis was their dad. When she said yes, the officers said they couldn’t take an infant born in the United States. But they loaded Andrés into a vehicle with his father as Luis cried for help.

And then they drove away.

Andrés and Luis were arrested together, but Trump’s ICE agents often deem children unaccompanied after encountering them alone in the community. In one case in Texas, a 15-year-old boy with an intellectual disability wandered away from his mom’s fruit stand to find a bathroom. When he didn’t return, she searched for him all over before reporting him missing. Authorities found him the next day but didn’t realize he was the same boy and failed to locate a legal guardian. They contacted ICE, which sent him to ORR. He stayed in the agency’s care for 48 days, even as his mother pleaded for his release, and even after he developed appendicitis and was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery.

Some kids are sent to ORR simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. That was true for a 13-year-old girl in Pennsylvania who, after law enforcement encountered her at the scene of someone else’s arrest, was placed in ORR custody in New York and Texas for more than a year, even though she’d been living with her family when she was detained, according to an attorney who worked on the case.

Many others have been sent back to ORR after being accused of a minor crime like shoplifting, smoking, or fishing without a license. “If the child were a US citizen,” says Jennifer Vanegas, an attorney at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, “the police would call the kid’s parents and send them home.”

DHS lists these petty infractions as reasons to re-refer children to ORR, but the justification is often pretextual, according to another source with knowledge of the cases. Charges are usually dismissed once the child is transferred to a shelter. “You could see a pattern: They were trying to find literally any basis to force an encounter with the child, seemingly fabricate or exaggerate the encounter, use that as the basis to take them into DHS custody, refer them to ORR, and then dismiss that charge,” the source noted. (DHS directed all questions involving ORR to Health and Human Services.)

ICE has been arresting guardians who show up to complete sponsorship requirements: “They are using the children as bait.”

As in Andrés’ case, parents aren’t always notified promptly that their child was transferred to ORR. An Ecuadorian father in Minneapolis “was horribly distraught” after his teenager didn’t come home in January, according to his attorney, Claire Glenn. The teen had called to tell his dad he was being arrested by ICE, but the agency claimed it didn’t know where he was. “I did not know whether ICE was lying or mistaken, or whether I had a very different case on my hand of a child that had been abducted by people who were impersonating ICE and perhaps were trafficking children,” Glenn says. She asked an investigator to locate the kid. It turned out he’d been sent to an ORR shelter in Michigan, even though he, like Andrés, came to the United States with his dad and was never unaccompanied.

In another case, a teen told ICE officers he lived with his dad down the block, but that his dad was deaf. They didn’t try to contact the father before sending his kid to ORR, according to an advocate. “There is a parent down the road, waiting for their child to come home,” says Kara Finck, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who was speaking about such cases in general. “To think that simply because your child is an immigrant, they can be declared unaccompanied and not returned to your care is a real assault on the very basic principles and tenets of family autonomy.”

Kids will say, “‘I told them my dad was at work a mile away or my mom was at home,” but the officers “don’t care,” former ORR deputy director Smyers told us.

When authorities do reach out, it can come with a risk. Last year, Mileidy Yamaly Contreras Flores got a call from the police department in Chelsea, Massachusetts. It was her 15-year-old son, who had immigrated with her from Honduras in 2019. He’d been in a fight and gotten arrested, and he needed an adult to pick him up at the station. Her husband went—and was detained by ICE after he arrived, according to a subsequent lawsuit. The teen was then sent to ORR in another state. By the time the suit was filed, he had been separated from his family for nearly seven months.

ICE initially sent Andrés out of state, too; he stayed in several hotel rooms in Arizona, according to a legal filing, before officers brought him back to Texas. It was determined he would live with a foster family but spend his days at an ORR shelter and attend school there.

Mariana could not understand why the government labeled her stepson unaccompanied. “The child was never alone,” she said.

Attorney and former Georgia state representative Stacey Abrams speaks at a vigil near the US Capitol calling for an end to ICE child and family detention.Leigh Vogel/Free Famlies Coalition/Getty

DHS wouldn’t answer questions about how it makes such determinations or decides to separate immigrant parents and children instead of keeping them together in family detention. Asked about claims that the administration is “kidnapping” immigrant children, a spokesperson insisted: “ICE does not separate families.”

ORR said Andrés would remain in its care while officials carried out “the family reunification process,” but that process dragged on. In May, Andrés’ lawyer Kristin Etter asked a federal court to order his release, arguing that he was unlawfully detained. “[He] should not have been designated as an unaccompanied child because he was encountered together with his father and his stepmother,” she wrote in the petition. Family separation was unnecessary, Etter argued.

The boy and his family waited for the court to weigh in.

There are fewer unaccompanied minors in federal custody now than in the past. That’s largely because not as many kids have been entering the United States by themselves. ORR received just 3,500 referrals from July 2025 through May 2026, according to a source familiar with the data. But a record number of these children are being referred by ICE, an agency that in the past hasn’t sent many kids to ORR, at least compared with US Customs and Border Protection. As a result, the share of referrals from the nation’s interior, rather than the border—kids like Andrés who are already settled into American life—has increased dramatically.

Jonathan White, who managed ORR’s unaccompanied children program in 2017, says interior referrals represented between 3 and 5 percent of total referrals to the agency during the Obama administration and the first Trump administration. They were also “very rare” under Biden, Smyers says. But from July 2025 through May 2026, interior referrals were about 20 percent of the total, according to the source familiar with the data. Many of the attorneys we interviewed believe the shift from border to interior referrals has only grown more pronounced since then, and that interior referrals now make up about half of all new ORR cases.

This change matters enormously, advocates say, because the government’s shelter system wasn’t designed for children who are already settled in the United States. ORR staffers, too, are concerned, according to a source with knowledge of the situation: “I think most people agree that it’s only hurting kids and hurting families and not at all part of ORR’s central mission.”

Although federal law requires that minors be placed in the “least restrictive setting possible,” ORR’s shelters often have a carceral feel. The kids have to wear approved clothing, any valuables they have are confiscated, and they are allowed to eat and shower only at designated times. “I feel imprisoned and very closed in here,” a 16-year-old girl being held in a Texas ORR shelter said in a sworn legal declaration. “We cannot touch each other, we cannot hug, we cannot share food.”

“We’re putting them in prisons, essentially,” says attorney Richardson.

A young person who just crossed the border alone benefits from a bed and the chance to see a doctor, Smyers told us, but the “Americanized” immigrant kids experience a kind of culture shock when they’re detained. Instead of studying algebra or world history, as they would at their regular school, they might have to sit through ORR lessons on how to tell time, or how to name fruits and vegetables in English.

Children are also being held in custody longer. The average stay in ORR has increased from about one month under President Biden to roughly six months under Trump, according to the agency’s own data, and some kids are locked up for more than a year. ORR shelters are not equipped for long-term care, Smyers says, and children are struggling with their mental health. Suicidal ideation and behavioral problems are increasingly common, according to Smyers, attorneys who represent kids in ORR care, and other sources familiar with the agency’s work.

It is “the same routine every day,” says Alexa Sendukas, a Texas attorney who represents unaccompanied children. It’s “incredibly stressful and confusing, especially for the little ones. They don’t understand why they can’t get out.”

Attorneys blame Trump’s policy changes for the longer stays. Relatives can apply to sponsor the kids and bring them home, but the administration has made the application process more arduous, narrowing the types of accepted identification and proof-of-address documents, and requiring potential sponsors to attend in-person appointments. When children are re-referred, ORR requires their old sponsors—who were previously vetted and approved—to jump through these hoops too.

In a statement, ORR said the changes are intended to ensure that children are not placed with criminals. The Biden administration, “prioritized speed over safety,” a spokesperson said, resulting in “children being released to sponsors who abused, assaulted, or trafficked them.” DHS sent us a list of unnamed sponsors who it claimed had been arrested for domestic violence and other crimes. ORR is being “careful, not slow, because children’s lives are at stake,” the spokesperson added.

While some cases do raise legitimate welfare concerns, parents and guardians say the administration is depriving other children of homes that are perfectly safe.

Lawyers representing four children in shelters in Texas and New York who’d been re-referred to ORR sued the administration in February—the kids had been languishing in the agency’s care while their families tried, without success, to get them out. “These children have been forced to spend extremely long periods of time away from their family, friends, school, and community without justification,” their complaint reads.

It can be dangerous for guardians to try to get their children back. ORR shares information with ICE, which has arrested people who show up to complete fingerprinting and other sponsorship requirements. “They are using the children as bait,” Sendukas says. Fear can deter relatives from stepping up. The Acacia Center for Justice reported last year that releases from ORR to sponsors were “as low as they could possibly be.”

The new restrictions have “basically brought the entire [unaccompanied children] program to a halt,” says a source familiar with the situation. “Because sponsors can’t come forward, kids have nowhere else to go.” ORR, the source added, has become a “de-facto arm of DHS to facilitate their enforcement and detention mission.”

There’s a reason Congress placed ORR within HHS and not DHS. Namely, lawmakers didn’t think the agency overseeing the care of immigrant children should be the same one that handles enforcement and deportations. But those lines are now blurred.

Today, the administration offers teens it deems unaccompanied a payment of $2,500 or more if they’ll agree to leave the United States. Children also are given a handout that threatens lengthy detention and criminal prosecution of noncitizen parents should they take their case to court, as they are legally entitled to do. “You will be detained,” the memo promises, “for a prolonged period of time.”

The administration, Smyers says, is “scaring kids as a way to circumvent the law.”

Portions of a document the Trump administration gives some “unaccompanied” children.National Immigrant Justice Center court declaration

“They are putting in place all of these different pressure points to force kids out of this country without due process and without any protections,” concurs Melissa Adamson, a senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law.

All this appears to be part of a broader crackdown on immigrant children. Last year, the government tried to fly dozens of Guatemalan children from ORR shelters out of the country in the middle of the night, but a court intervened. ProPublica reported that unaccompanied minors have been detained and removed from the United States at three times the rate they were during Trump’s first term.

A federal judge found that even if Andrés wasn’t unaccompanied when ICE separated him from his dad and stepmom, he was unaccompanied now.

Making matters worse, immigrant children are contending with an acute shortage in legal representation. The administration recently ended a long-standing contract with an experienced nonprofit network that represented unaccompanied minors in court, handing the job instead to an organization founded by a former ICE agent. Increasingly, young children have been appearing before immigration judges without a lawyer.

“Donald Trump and his accomplices have directed every element of the federal government towards meeting their deportation quota, even if that means tearing families apart and traumatizing children,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the top Democrat on the committee with jurisdiction over ORR, whose office is preparing a report about children in the agency’s care, told us in a statement. “Just like Trump’s first term, the cruelty is the point. The individuals responsible for flouting federal laws and harming children in the process will be held to account.”

In court last month, a Justice Department attorney said ORR has a responsibility to accept referrals from other federal agencies that have deemed a child unaccompanied. That determination, by definition, “means that the child has no parent available to provide care or custody in the United States,” the attorney said. 

But ORR officials don’t always agree with those assessments. Angie Salazar, the agency’s acting director, who came to ORR from ICE, has on occasion objected to classifying minors with a parent in the community as unaccompanied, according to a source familiar with internal deliberations. In a few cases, she has intervened personally, the source claimed, and demanded the child be released to their parent. But, Smyers points out, when there’s a disagreement, “unfortunately DHS normally wins.” (ORR and Salazar didn’t respond to a request for comment on this.)

A protester at Manhattan Civic Center, where federal agents detained immigration court respondents, displays a copy of the drawing made by a child held with her family in Dilley Detention Facility in Texas.Gina M. Randazzo/ZUMA

Andrés’ father was released from detention on bond a few months after his arrest. He would soon have to return to Venezuela. But Andrés remained stuck in foster care and was struggling. At one point, ORR caseworkers told the family he was unable to sleep, and screaming for his parents at night; a doctor suggested medication to help him rest, but Luis and Mariana didn’t want to approve pharmaceuticals because of his young age.

The caseworkers also told Mariana that Andrés had been acting out. Another boy who lived with the foster family complained that he wanted to be left alone, but that Andrés, lonely and looking for a friend, kept trying to hug him. “My son is suffering,” Luis told us. “He’s small. He needs his father.”

While Luis was still in detention, Andrés had called and “started crying, saying that he didn’t want to be there anymore, that he wanted to be with us already,” Mariana said. She’d tried to become his sponsor but couldn’t meet ORR’s new requirements because she lacked a taxpayer ID number, so she withdrew her application.

Eventually, Andrés took what seemed like the only route left: He asked an immigration judge to let him go back to Venezuela and be reunited with his biological mom, who said she could meet him at the airport. The judge granted him voluntary departure in July.

This didn’t mean he was free to leave ORR care right away. There had been earthquakes in Venezuela. It might take weeks or months to arrange his travel, and who would watch him in the meantime? A federal judge found that even if he wasn’t unaccompanied when ICE separated him from his dad and stepmom, he was unaccompanied now. He “does not have a parent or legal guardian in the United States who ‘is available to provide care and physical custody,’” the judge wrote in an order dismissing Andrés’ petition to leave foster care. “[W]ithout a sponsor, he cannot be released.”

And so, Andrés waited, counting the days until he could board a flight to Venezuela and be with a parent again. Finally, in August, more than three months after his apprehension, he was allowed to travel.

But when the plane landed in Barcelona, Venezuela, Andrés’ mother was nowhere to be found. The US government hadn’t told the family what time, or even what day, he would arrive. “We just had to give her our best guess,” says Etter, Andrés’ attorney.

After all the fanfare around vetting sponsors, supposedly for the safety of the children, no one in the administration had bothered to make sure an adult would be present to receive Andrés on the other end. He ended up waiting on the side of the road outside the airport until later that night, when Etter was able to help his mom locate him.

“They literally were gonna fly an 11-year-old boy by himself and just dump him in Venezuela,” she says. “They don’t really care who the kids are going home to, or what they’re going home to, just as long as they’re going home.”

Next week the Supreme Court will return from its summer recess to hear a new term of cases. While the court is already slated to make rulings with far-reaching consequences, the most important decisions looming this term may not even be on its radar yet.

Earlier this week, the justices announced that they would take up what may be the most important case of the term. The Trump administration had asked the court to hear Rhoney v. Barbosa da Cunha to review lower court rulings against its mandatory-detention policy for undocumented immigrants. How the Supreme Court decides the case could have vast implications for the Trump administration’s ability to carry out mass deportations.

At issue in Rhoney is whether the federal government can indefinitely hold undocumented immigrants in custody while their deportation proceedings take place. Since at least the 1980s, immigration courts have routinely allowed them to post bond while they await the outcome of their cases. The Trump administration changed tack in July 2025, arguing that it could instead hold undocumented immigrants without bond.

To support this position, the administration cited a 1996 law known as the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. Everyone calls it IIRIRA instead. Under IIRIRA, the Justice Department has claimed that one provision in the law requires federal officials to detain undocumented immigrants who illegally crossed the U.S. border. That provision says that “an alien who is an applicant for admission” into the United States “shall be detained” if “the examining immigration officer determines that an alien seeking admission is not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted.”

To that end, the Justice Department has invoked the IIRIRA provision to justify holding any undocumented immigrant in custody without bond hearings until their deportation hearings are concluded—or, importantly, until they “voluntarily” agree to leave the country. Since the Trump administration has detained tens of thousands of immigrants in squalid conditions over the past 18 months, an unknown number of those held have agreed to forgo deportation hearings to leave the country.

Holding people indefinitely without due process has been illegal in the Anglo-American legal tradition since Magna Carta in 1215. More to the point, the administration’s policy appears to be based on a misreading of federal law. While the provision they cite does require mandatory detention in a narrow set of circumstances, it only applies to people who are an “applicant for admission”—meaning that they presented themselves at the U.S. border for entry.

Ricardo Barbosa da Cunha, the plaintiff in this case, did no such thing. He crossed the U.S. border in 2004 after traveling from his native Brazil through Mexico. He and his family have lived in Massachusetts for the last two decades, where he owns a small construction business. Barbosa da Cunha has had a legal work authorization since 2016 and has no criminal record. Federal immigration agents arrested him on the way to work last year and have kept him in custody since then.

In April, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals sided with him and rejected the administration’s interpretation of IIRIRA. The section it cited does not apply to undocumented immigrants “who were not apprehended while entering the country or shortly thereafter,” Judge Joseph Bianco wrote for the court. Instead, immigrants like Barbosa da Cunha fall under a different section of IIRIRA that does allow for bond hearings before an immigration judge.

Lower courts are often divided and splintered about how to read certain federal statutes. This case is not one of them. The New York Times reported earlier this week that more than 500 federal district-court judges have rejected the Trump administration’s mandatory-detention policy as unlawful, as have nine of the 11 federal circuit courts of appeal. The Trump administration is hoping that it can garner at least five votes from the justices to outweigh them.

The Supreme Court will also hear another major immigration case later this term on the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to third-country removals. Most deported immigrants have typically been returned to their home countries, aside from recent arrivals at the U.S. border in Mexico who are returned there. In their zeal to remove as many immigrants as possible from the United States, Trump administration officials have shipped thousands of them to countries in Africa that agree to take them in exchange for favorable diplomatic and financial treatment.

Multiple lower courts have held that immigrants must be able to challenge third-country removals, which the Trump administration has vociferously rejected. Some deportation flights have stranded immigrants in countries where they do not speak the language or—as in the case of South Sudan—where they are at risk for torture and abuse by local officials. The Supreme Court declined to forbid the Trump administration from carrying out these types of deportations while it considers the case—a grim sign for the immigrants’ hopes that the justices will ultimately side with them.

The first case of the term next week will also be one of the term’s most important decisions: Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County. At issue is whether local communities that are harmed by climate change and its effects can seek damages in state courts from oil and gas companies that contributed to higher carbon emissions. The town of Boulder, Colorado, argued that its claims fit well within traditional causes of action for harms caused by companies.

Fossil fuel companies have urged the Supreme Court to reject these claims, arguing that federal law preempts the town’s lawsuit and that state courts cannot hear them at all. The high court may also decide to punt the case on procedural grounds for now. Though the court is hardly averse to ruling in favor of the fossil fuel industry, Boulder received some good news on Monday when Justice Samuel Alito announced that he would recuse himself from the case after resisting past suggestions to do so.

In Viramontes v. Cook County, the justices will examine whether state assault-weapons bans can survive under the court’s new Second Amendment precedents. The plaintiffs in the case are challenging bans on AR-15s and similar rifles in both Illinois’s most populous county and the state of Connecticut. (The justices consolidated them on appeal.) Almost a dozen states have similar laws on the books. The Supreme Court has not heard a Second Amendment challenge to laws banning a specific type of firearm this century.

More than a few plaintiffs asked it to do so after proclaiming an individual right to bear arms in 2008, but the court long declined to hear such cases. In 2022, the court’s conservative majority made it substantially easier for gun owners to challenge gun laws when it laid out a new, stricter Second Amendment test that requires states to find a “historical analogue” for laws to survive judicial scrutiny. How that test comports with earlier Supreme Court decisions that allow states to restrict “dangerous” and “unusual” firearms will be the central question for the court.

On the constitutional front, one of the most curious upcoming cases this term is Jouppi v. Arizona. The case centers on an Alaska pilot who flew into a dry town with a passenger who had a six pack of beer in their possession. In response, state officials charged the pilot with violating state liquor laws—which are aimed at reducing alcoholism and domestic violence in the state’s isolated interior—and seized his airplane, which is valued at more than $77,000.

Jouppi, the pilot, argued that confiscating his Cessna violated the Eighth Amendment, which forbids levying excessive fines as punishment for a crime. He argued that seizing an airplane for carrying a few cans of beer met that threshold. The Supreme Court has not elucidated the scope of the excessive fines clause or what counts as “excessive” in this context. How the court decides the case could affect criminal forfeiture laws across the country.

The Supreme Court will also tackle what we can call the “known unknowns.” These are cases that the court is likely to hear but hasn’t yet intervened in. One area where the court may feel compelled to weigh in is on legal challenges to prediction markets and sports betting. A Supreme Court ruling in 2018 struck down a federal ban on sports betting, allowing dozens of states to pass laws to legalize and regulate sportsbooks within their borders. Last year, prediction-market companies like Kalshi and Polymarket also began allowing users to place wagers on the outcomes of professional and amateur sports at all levels in all 50 states, even those that have not legalized sports betting.

The prediction-market industry argued that it wasn’t really offering “bets.” Instead, it claims to be offering “swaps,” where customers could buy contracts on its exchanges that would pay out depending on the outcome of an event. (As courts have noted, its advertising often said otherwise.) The industry also argued that it was regulated by federal law through the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, preempting state enforcement with an extremely favorable regulatory regime from the Trump administration.

State regulators in Nevada and state attorneys general in California, New York, and other states sued Kalshi and Polymarket nonetheless for operating illegal sports-betting websites in their states. The states won a major victory over the summer when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that prediction-market swaps on sports are bets and that federal law on derivatives exchanges hadn’t displace the states’ traditional authority to regulate gambling. At least one other circuit reached the opposite conclusion, making it likely that the justices will need to resolve the split in the coming term.

Another obvious area where the court will likely feel compelled to involve itself is on President Donald Trump’s extraordinary claims of executive power. During the summer recess, for example, the Supreme Court forbade a lower court from blocking construction of an illegal ballroom on the ruins of the White House’s East Wing, over the dissents of Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberal justices. Litigation over the fate of the Kennedy Center, which Trump has demanded to be illegally renamed in his honor or face financial ruin, or a heavily armed 250-foot arch outside Arlington National Cemetery, could also reach the court this term.

Since it is an election year, among the most important cases will be election-related ones. The court routinely hears a small number of cases involving ongoing elections on the shadow docket every two years, usually involving last-minute changes or new restrictions. Since last year, the justices have already considered a spate of cases involving the partisan-gerrymandering wars, which it largely let play out without further intervention. Some of those gerrymanders came about after the court effectively legalized racial gerrymandering last term.

This time, the concern is about what Trump could do after the election if he and Republicans suffer major defeats and lose control of Congress, as polls suggest they likely will. The Justice Department’s seizure of ballots in Georgia earlier this year stoked fears among voting rights groups that the administration will interfere in the certification of state results under the false guise of investigating voter fraud. The Supreme Court rejected Trump’s legal bids to overturn the 2020 election six years ago. How they respond to any illegal and extralegal attempts to corrupt the 2026 midterms could be the most important test that the justices face this term.

Well, we’ve entered that time-honored phase of the campaign that we’ve come to know so well: When Republicans turn to their closing argument about the issue that is keeping Americans up at night. Gas prices? The cost of a pound of ground beef? The war in Iran? The cost of health care, or the closing of so many rural hospitals? No, no, no, and no. The issue, of course, is transgender athletes.

“David Jolly is somebody who thinks it’s still okay for boys to be in girls’ sports,” said Byron Donalds, the GOP gubernatorial nominee in Florida of his Democratic opponent. “Just pure insanity.” Ads of that nature are running against Sherrod Brown in Ohio, James Talarico in Texas, and many other places. Talarico has walked back his previously supportive stance, and other prominent Democrats in purple or red states have taken similar positions. But that won’t stop the deluge. You’d think—and of course, this is exactly what Republicans want people to think—that Brown and Talarico spend two-thirds of their waking hours scheming to figure out ways to get trans athletes into Buckeye and Longhorn uniforms.

It’s pathetic. Here we have a president and a political party that have done the following. They have seen prices rise dramatically on their watch and have not only had no response to it, but at least in the case of the president, have repeatedly denied that this is even happening; they have sanctioned and defended the detention (in harsh conditions) of innocent people and the shooting of American citizens by a lavishly funded and poorly trained paramilitary force whose members are recruited through appeals to racial extremism; they have started a calamitous war because the president created the conditions that made war, in his mind, necessary (that is, by rescinding the JCPOA); they have exploded the deficit and the debt; they have engaged in (the president) or turned a blind eye to (the rest of the party) corruption on a Ferdinand-Marcos type of scale. In these and numerous other ways, Donald Trump and the Republican Party have made daily life harder for regular Americans while simultaneously degrading the nation’s character and soul. And they’re going to finish this campaign by trying to terrify people about a thing that hardly exists.

That’s a point that can’t be made often enough. In December 2024, NCAA President Charlie Baker was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “How many athletes are there in the U.S. in NCAA schools?”, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin asked. About 510,000, said Baker. And how many of these athletes are openly transgender, Durbin wondered. The answer came back: “Less than 10.”

And what about the Olympics? In this century, which in this case is likely the same thing as saying “ever,” exactly two transgender athletes have competed in the Olympics, along with about six nonbinary athletes, out of something on the order of 13,000 Olympians every four years (the International Olympics Committee has banned trans women from competing in women’s categories starting in 2028; you can agree or disagree with this decision, but whatever one’s view, the fact is that it means that the future numbers will be zero).

Finally, firm numbers on high-school participation don’t seem to exist. It stands to reason that it could be a bit higher, because a lot more athletes make high school teams than win a collegiate scholarship or a spot on an Olympic team, but it’s hard to think of a good reason why it would be that much higher.

The argument that there are very few trans athletes in the country is one Democrats make a lot. But there’s a second argument that I don’t hear them make very often at all, which I think would be extremely effective, maybe even to the point of ending the debate in most voters’ minds: Individual sports all have governing bodies, and it’s not as if those bodies haven’t been thinking about this issue. They have, and they, or most of them, have drawn up policies. So why don’t we just leave it to them?

It’s a more important point that it may seem. Indeed, I would argue that allowing Republicans to talk generally and vaguely about “sports”—a category that includes everything from football to curling to underwater hockey (yep, it’s a thing), as well as everything from the heights of organized professional sports to local rec leagues—amounts to allowing the demagogues to set the terms of debate.

There are all kinds of sports being played out there, and what’s right for one sport might not be right for another. From the web site transathlete.com, here’s a sampling of policies:

•USA Badminton: admits trans women “on a case-by-case basis.”

•USA Biathlon: states that all athletes “may participate in the gender category that best aligns with their gender identity without restrictions, medical intervention, or proof of gender.”

•USA Cycling: adopted a policy last year making the “female” category “open only to those assigned female at birth on their original birth certificate.”

•US Figure Skating: essentially the same as USA Cycling.

•US Golf Association: Promulgated a policy in 2024 allowing trans athletes to participate “if they meet requirements.” Golf!

•USA Roller Sports: a policy that “follows the 2015 IOC Consensus Statement and requires testosterone levels below 10nmol/L for trans women” (that’s a low testosterone level for young men).

•USA Swimming: adopted a policy in 2025 to “limit the female category to those assigned female at birth.”

Several governing bodies have not promulgated a policy, meaning presumably that it’s not a burning issue in their realms: canoe and kayak, equestrian, luge, pentathlon, skateboarding, softball, table tennis, a few others.

This is important information for people to have. Again, one may agree or disagree with these policies; that’s not the point. The point here is what Democrats should tell voters. And I think they can flip the tables on Republicans by bringing these facts to light, because doing so will make voters see that thousands of responsible adults who have devoted their lives to getting young people to play sports have given this matter a lot of thought, and maybe it’s true that politicians don’t need to meddle in this. Facts don’t usually defeat demagoguery, but in this case, they would help a lot.

So, Democrats should say that. But the larger questions here for Democrats concern tone and context. And this is where Democrats have to understand a crucial point: We aren’t still in the 1990s, when Democrats could use the left as a punching bag on such issues. That isn’t the reality anymore, and doing that would be a political, and moral, disaster.

I think everyone, save maybe a small number of ideological activists, understands that this is a tough issue for Democrats, especially in places like Ohio and Texas. Earlier this year, The New Republic commissioned a poll of around 2,400 rank-and-file Democrats on a broad range of issues. Bear in mind here that this was a very liberal group—when given five ideologies by which to label themselves, about a third said they were “liberal” and another third “progressive,” which was clearly defined to respondents as being a little left of liberal.

We asked folks about their level of support for three aspects of trans rights: protecting trans people from discrimination; allowing trans youth access to gender-affirming care; and allowing trans youth to compete in sports according to their chosen gender identity. The answers: protection from discrimination was supported by 80 percent of respondents; gender-affirming care, by 62 percent; playing sports, just 39 percent. And remember—these were loyal Democrats only. Polls of Americans in general tend to show about three-quarters of the population opposed to allowing trans women to compete in women’s sports.

Those kinds of numbers make it tough for Democrats in purple or red states to take a pure pro-trans athlete line. Again, I think most people understand that. But there are defensible ways to finesse the issue and indefensible ways.

Under “Indefensible,” see Gavin Newsom. The California Governor decided it would be dandy to announce his anti-trans athlete position on his podcast with Charlie Kirk as his guest. Kirk, of course, expressed his hatred of gay and trans people on numerous occasions. It was the debut episode of the podcast, in March 2025. Someone aching to be the Democratic nominee for president telling someone like Kirk that “I agree with you completely” on that issue—it’s the textbook definition of throwing a small and powerless constituency under the bus and pandering to a notoriously homophobic right-winger.

A generation or two ago, what Newsom did would have been very widely praised by pundits for “standing up” to the left-wing loonies. There was some of that when he did it, but not very much. There was far more criticism. That’s what’s different today from, say, 1992, when Bill Clinton created his famous “Sister Souljah moment.” Centrists who pine for Democrats to do a Sister Souljah on trans people today fail to understand how things have changed. In a world where verdicts on such moves are decided not by David Broder and Tim Russert but by TikTokkers and podcasters and YouTube influencers, any attempt at such a moment is guaranteed to backfire and offend liberal base voters. It’s also, you know, the wrong thing to do from a moral and ethical standpoint.

More broadly—and this is the needed context I referred to above—Democrats need to keep in mind that trans people are under assault in this country from the right wing. In many states, trans people—not children, but grown adults, who should be able to live their lives without the state threatening their political and civil rights—live in fear of everyday situations, or circumstances like having to go to the hospital. Calls to LBGTQ hotlines have spiked. Forty-three states have passed 63 bills this year alone impinging on the rights of transgender people. In one poll, nearly half of trans respondents said they had moved or wanted to move to a more hospitable place.

If Republicans are going to bang on about trans athletes, then part of the Democratic response must be to broaden the conversation and remind Americans of this appalling dehumanization campaign. Your average American may not be willing to fight and die for his trans brothers and sisters, but I doubt he wants people to be persecuted in the United States of America. Polls tend to show that 70 or 80 (or more) percent of Americans think trans people deserve the same rights as everyone else.

So, to sum up, the Democratic response on the trans athlete question should consist of three parts:

1. Look, all these sports have governing bodies, and those bodies have all studied this. What works for fencing might not work for track and field. So why don’t we just leave it to the people who ponder these matters for a living, and keep the politicians out of it?

2. The president of the NCAA said there were fewer than 10 trans athletes out of literally more than half a million athletes at America’s colleges and universities, so why is my opponent spending so much time talking about this and not gas prices and the war?

3. Finally, if my opponent wants to talk so much about transgender people, let’s talk about the way trans people, kids and adults, are being persecuted in red states and living in fear, and the fact that trans Americans who are willing and eager to wear this nation’s uniform and even die for their country if asked are being denied the right to do so.

Those three points defend a progressive political position without throwing anybody under any bus or bowing to right-wing framing or pandering to some presumed lowest-common-denominator thinking. They also, I wager, would sound like common sense to your average person.

It’s worth pointing out just how much the landscape has changed since the 2024 election bred fear that Trump’s “they/them” political ads hurt Kamala Harris’s chances. Need proof? Here is Lanae Erickson, the senior vice president for social policy for none other than Third Way, talking about trans issues in a September piece at Assigned Media, a web site that tracks trans issues:
<blockquote>“Going after healthcare for adults, kicking people out of the military, taking people’s driver’s licenses away, they can’t pick up their kids at school – these are well beyond the pale for most American voters. We’ve got an HHS secretary right now who believes the only appropriate healthcare for transgender people is conversion therapy. That’s crazy.” If Third Way’s point person on this issue isn’t afraid to say the right thing, no one in the Democratic coalition has any excuse.

I realize that Democrats still have to answer the basic “do you support trans females participating in girls’ sports?” with a simple yes or a no. Some, like Talarico and others, will feel they have to say no. But I think if they say it in the context of the kind of rhetoric I suggest, most activists will grant them some leeway. Activists worry that yielding on the athletes question will inevitably lead to giving way on other issues, which is certainly a fair concern. But making a broader defense of the rights of transgender people—and actually meaning it—can allay that concern.

And most regular voters will think what they said is fine, and they can pivot back to the issues people actually care about. And if the Democrats can fight off the relentless and vile Republican attacks on this issue, that leaves the Republicans with nothing. Which is precisely what they offer the country.

Four years after the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to an abortion with the Dobbs decision, access to the procedure remains a critical matter for voters across the country. Abortion rights advocates are hoping that abortion-related ballot measures in four states will inspire voters to turn out in the crucial midterm elections—and support candidates in favor of protecting abortion access.

The four states considering such ballot measures are Idaho, Missouri, Nevada, and Virginia. The initiatives in Nevada and Virginia would not change existing law but would amend the constitution to enshrine abortion protections. The Idaho ballot measure would reverse the state’s strict abortion ban. Meanwhile, the Missouri initiative is attempting to undo protections approved by voters as a constitutional amendment in 2024.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, 17 states have put forth abortion-related ballot measures. In 2022 and 2023, every state that voted on these measures protected access to abortion. Voters in seven out of the 10 states considering abortion-related ballot measures in 2024 supported protecting abortion rights. But even the failure of ballot measures did not necessarily translate to lack of support: In Florida, an initiative to protect abortion rights received 57 percent of the vote, which did not clear the state’s 60 percent threshold for adding a state constitutional amendment.

“We’ve seen time and time again in states across the country that voters do turn out en masse to support abortion rights ballot measures. They have shown us that when they have a chance to change their state laws and support abortion access, they will take it,” said Sarah Standiford, national campaigns director at the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.

Control of Congress is up for grabs in this year’s elections. Democrats are favored to take the House of Representatives and have a shot at winning the Senate, as well. (The latest analysis from the Cook Political Report says that Democrats retaking the lower chamber is a “done deal” and assesses the chance of seizing the upper chamber as “very realistic.”) But the downballot contests are key where reproductive rights are concerned. State legislatures and gubernatorial races are perhaps even more crucial to ensuring abortion access. Since the Dobbs decision kicked the question of abortion rights to states, they have become the primary battlegrounds on the issue. Abortion rights advocates believe that ballot measures may help juice turnout in these states, but the challenge is ensuring that voters also back their preferred candidates.

“The ballot measures are a tremendous tool in our arsenal here, in order to protect and expand access, but it’s imperative that people are also voting their values up and down the ballot, and and voting to elect people to state office that are going to carry out and enforce the will of the voters by implementing these amendments in the appropriate way,” said Ryan Stitzlein, vice president of political and government relations at Reproductive Freedom for All, an abortion rights organization that launched a $23.5 million voter mobilization campaign earlier this year.

Support for abortion does not necessarily translate to support for Democratic candidates. Of the seven states that approved ballot measures supporting abortion rights, four supported Trump in the 2024 election. Moreover, in Montana and Missouri, politicians who oppose abortion rights were elected governor.

A recent paper by scholars at the University of Richmond and Texas Christian University found that abortion ballot measures aided Democrats in 2022—but two years later, they benefited Republican candidates. The researchers concluded that the spillover effects benefiting Republicans were a result of moderate voters who supported expanding abortion access while also voting for GOP candidates.

“In 2024, moderate voters who would have otherwise voted for Democratic candidates to protect abortion rights instead voted to protect abortion rights on the ballot measure while also voting for Republican candidates to align with their other policy preferences,” the report authors wrote.

Still, voters might now appreciate the stakes of electing candidates who support abortion access. A 2025 poll by the public opinion firm PerryUndem found that 46 percent of voters said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who supports abortion rights, including 45 percent of independent voters. (Forty-one percent of independent voters said it would not affect their vote at all.) Another 2025 survey from Navigator Research found that majorities of voters reported they probably or definitely could not support candidates who are in favor of banning or restricting access to abortion and contraceptives.

Linking politicians to their positions on abortion is a critical challenge for Nevadans campaigning to oust current Republican Governor Joe Lombardo from office. Although Lombardo signed abortion protections into law in 2023, critics point to his personal opposition to abortion and unwillingness to say whether he supports the amendment as proof that he cannot be trusted to protect access. Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom recently launched a $1 million digital ad campaign in support of the amendment, which also highlights Lombardo’s previous comments opposing abortion. Separately, Planned Parenthood Votes is also investing $1.2 million in ads slamming Lombardo.

Krystal Ortiz, campaign manager for Question 6 at Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom, expects that “yes” votes for the ballot initiative will likely outperform Democratic candidates, but that’s because it’s an issue that Nevadans overwhelmingly support. In accordance with Nevada law, voters must approve a citizen-initiated ballot initiative twice before it can be added to the state constitution. The measure enshrining abortion protections was passed with 63 percent of the vote in 2024, and is now on the ballot again.

Ortiz is focused on building on the work advocates did in 2026—they don’t need to get on the ballot this time, but they do need to remind voters what’s at stake, she said.

“One of the differences between 2026 and 2024 is that this year, we have even more proof that our rights are under attack,” Ortiz said, pointing to abortion bans in other states, as well as efforts by the Trump administration and GOP state attorneys general to limit access to the abortion medication mifepristone. “We’re reminding voters that we have been seeing these kinds of attacks all across the country, and that’s why we need this.”

Abortion rights advocates are also hopeful about the prospects of initiatives in Idaho and Missouri, which are both deeply Republican, even as the road to passage is bumpy. In Idaho, which has one of the strictest abortion bans in the nation, the GOP governor and attorney general succeeded in changing the language of the ballot measure to note that current law “preserves the life of preborn children by prohibiting abortion” with few exceptions. Because passage of the ballot initiative would mean establishment of statutory law and not a constitutional amendment, this measure could be repealed by the state’s conservative legislature even if it succeeds.

In Missouri, Republicans are attempting to sway voter sentiment by including language that would constitutionally ban gender transition care for minors—even though such surgeries and issuing new puberty blocker prescriptions have been illegal in the state since 2023.

Supporters of the amendment are highlighting the gender transition care aspect in their campaigning, and Stitzlein said that abortion rights advocates needed to convince voters that this measure is primarily an abortion ban.

“They’re not saying the word ‘abortion’ in all their paid media. They know that it’s because if they were honest about their intentions here, they would lose,” said Stitzlein. The amendment also shares the same name as the one that enshrined abortion rights two years ago: Where supporters needed to vote “yes” on Amendment 3 two years ago to protect access, they must vote “no” on Amendment 3 to do the same this year. The 2024 measure ensured the right to an abortion through fetal viability.

Even with the efforts to protect abortion access in red states under siege, advocates believe their campaigns will have long-term impact. Standiford said that, as someone who has long worked in abortion rights advocacy, she is very aware that victories can be temporary. Conversely, those wins can inspire voters to continue fighting because their actions at the ballot box result in immediate change. Even if rights are threatened, she argued, that will not depress the movement overall.

“What voters and supporters find energizing about it is they can translate their votes—especially on these constitutional amendment fights—immediately into protections for themselves and their families. And that is a really empowering place to be,” said Standiford.

A couple of weeks ago, the city of Seattle announced that its community violence intervention work would move into the city’s community safety department, also known as CARE. The next day, Baltimore announced the creation of a Department of Neighborhood Safety, which will manage the city’s violence prevention and community crisis response efforts. These cities are just the latest examples of an intriguing new trend of jurisdictions across the nation launching agencies specifically dedicated to community safety, a field of public health interventions designed to build safer neighborhoods. Just this year, New York City and Harris County, Texas, have launched or proposed agencies that join earlier established departments and offices of community safety in Albuquerque, Durham, Greensboro, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis.

The emergence of this community safety ecosystem is one of the more striking innovations in municipal governance in recent years. Community safety agencies are beginning to consolidate jurisdictions’ efforts to address safety through prevention and early intervention, rather than just law enforcement. These community safety interventions include community violence intervention, a range of programs designed to prevent community violence before it happens; community crisis response, a branch of first response designed to handle a range of behavioral health crises and low-level conflicts; and victims services and homeless outreach.

What binds all of these interventions together is a recognition that the most effective way to build safer neighborhoods is to rapidly connect vulnerable populations in crisis to stabilizing services. A violence intervention worker might only have a few hours to find new housing in a neighborhood across town for a family at risk of retaliatory violence. A community crisis responder may be able to provide mediation services to resolve a dispute between neighbors before it takes a darker turn. Or she may be the best equipped to stabilize a person in the downtown corridor experiencing a mental health crisis and then connect them to long-term care.

Community safety interventions are best understood and organized separately from law enforcement—not in opposition to law enforcement but because the draw of relying on enforcement and coercion can undermine the core ethos of community safety. The very point of these agencies is to develop city infrastructure that can intervene before law enforcement becomes necessary. These services can operate without the downsides of relying on force or coercion. Community safety and law enforcement may partner on specific initiatives, such as to deliver a co-response that pairs clinicians and officers to respond to highly volatile situations like high-acuity domestic violence calls or barricaded suspects. But ultimately, cities are wisely recognizing that trying to deliver community safety services from law enforcement agencies is not as effective as giving community safety its own home in the municipal ecosystem—and its own well-trained personnel.

These new community safety agencies are often leveraging services that already exist, but are doing so in a way that addresses long-standing problems in municipal governance related to siloing and reliable investment in and delivery of services. Public health–oriented safety interventions have often operated at a remove, scattered across—and sometimes duplicated across—various city departments. This disconnection has meant that the community violence intervention worker might not know whether a housing voucher is available for their vulnerable family, if they know anything about available housing services at all.

These safety interventions also have not historically received the level of investment afforded to law enforcement, and so, relatedly, they have not been held accountable for responding with the same level of urgency we expect from law enforcement. As a result, the person experiencing a mental health crisis has often faced a difficult choice: a police officer who can arrive quickly but may not be equipped to address the crisis or a trained clinician who may take hours, or days, to arrive. Traditional social services—even those with an implication for public safety—simply were not designed for rapid response. That is beginning to change. Instead of cities considering these programs as charitable and “nice to have,” they are beginning to build them into the city’s safety infrastructure as critical assets that must be deployed as reliably, and sometimes as rapidly, as law enforcement.

In doing so, they reflect a broader understanding of safety that more closely aligns with what residents have been seeking for decades. In Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, James Forman Jr. writes about how Black communities asking for both better protection from law enforcement and better social services and neighborhood investment over the course of the last half century have been given more (although rarely better) policing, but almost nothing in the way of services and investment. Building dedicated community safety agencies that are focused on leveraging social services, prevention, and early intervention rather than enforcement can help cities take a step back in the right direction, and in a way that also better aligns with how communities are actually thinking about safety.

Politicians often wrongly assume that communities concerned about safety are solely focused on law enforcement as a solution. But both opinion polling and academic research make it clear that people also prioritize prevention and early intervention strategies, including housing, education, employment, and even the design of the built environment of the neighborhood as part of their understanding of the safety of a place. In this way, community safety agencies represent the culmination of a long-overdue effort to address these concerns as vigorously as efforts to address crime rates through enforcement.

Community safety interventions are designed to keep some of the most vulnerable people in our neighborhoods safe, to the benefit of all of us. For example, people living with serious mental illness are more vulnerable than the general population to a range of victimizations, including from police violence. Despite this, our safety infrastructure has largely treated them primarily as a source of potential danger and a problem for law enforcement to solve. In a community safety framework, a moment of mental health crisis is an opportunity to get that person the help they need from someone trained to provide it—and in a way that is most likely to lead to long-term care, reduce the likelihood of additional crises, and ultimately create a safer environment for a person in need of help.

None of this would matter if the evidence base for this work wasn’t strong—and growing. Evaluations of crisis response programs in several cities indicate they reduce arrests, crime reports, and response times while increasing connections to immediate and follow-up services. One multisite study found the likelihood of arrest was 42.5 percent lower in the year following contact with a mobile crisis team. Countless evaluations of community violence intervention programs across the nation have shown impact. A recent study of Richmond, California’s Peacemaker Fellowship found sustained reductions in firearm violence over the course of 14 years.

The community safety field still faces several barriers to achieving its full potential. For one, the field’s interventions are only effective as long as services remain available. Community safety work is already beginning to expose the insufficiency of our decades-long underfunding of the social safety net—especially in housing and behavioral health. Policymakers have always been willing to find the money necessary to jail and imprison as many people as the police were willing to arrest. But they haven’t always been willing to find the money necessary to house and treat those who need it. That will have to change. Governments will need to figure out how to develop and deliver services at a scale commensurate with problems that have been papered over by overreliance on jails, which have become the nation’s de facto treatment facilities for mental illness. As Moki Macias, the director of Atlanta’s Policing Alternatives and Diversion once asked me, how effective would we think the police were if they didn’t have a jail to take people to?

Community safety agencies have emerged primarily (though not at all exclusively) within city governments, raising real questions about how to develop complementary roles for federal, county, and state governments in advancing the field. This is especially the case because many of the behavioral health interventions critical to effective community safety reside in county departments. Bridging the gap and figuring out resource allocation between these county-based services and public safety–oriented teams operating out of cities will be critical for long-term success. State governments will need to begin developing standards for program operations, workforce development, and protocols for partnering with other governmental entities like 911 call centers.

Perhaps most important, federal and state governments will need to develop reliable funding streams for needed community safety services, as well as operations. Current federal streams like Medicaid and Department of Housing and Urban Development housing vouchers can provide some help to budget-strapped localities, but neither program was designed with community safety in mind. Reforms will be needed to ensure these resources can be reliably used by community safety agencies. The federal government may also need to develop dedicated grants for community safety agencies, much like it does for police through the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the Community Oriented Policing Services Office.

If these early successes are any indication, the field of community safety has the potential to fundamentally redefine and expand the way cities address safety concerns and improve the quality of life for everyone—including an unburdened police force. Policymakers, researchers, philanthropic organizations, and community members all have a role to play in ensuring the field continues to grow. The reward for this focus could be that, for the first time, local governments could have infrastructure specifically designed to build safety through prevention and early intervention—not just law enforcement and incarceration.

A new Fox poll showing James Talarico ahead in the Texas Senate race unnerved Fox figures. One MAGA guest on Fox exclaimed: “Texans have to wake up!” The poll also has truly terrible news for Trump: His approval is upside down in this reliably red state, he’s cratering with Latinos, and he’s losing the working class, which is his base. He’s even underwater with non-MAGA Republicans, a key demographic that Talarico has worked to win. This comes as Republicans are leaking word that they’re shifting spending out of the North Carolina Senate race, which appears gone. They’re putting more into shoring up the MAGA-GOP candidate in Iowa and even Kansas Senator Roger Marshall, showing serious worry deep in MAGA country. We talked to political theorist Alan Elrod. We discuss how the Texas GOP’s white male supremacy and violent ethnonationalism perfectly represent today’s Republican Party, and how it’s deeply alienating mainstream America. We also dig into how it’s all creating space for a new moral language to emerge among Democrats. Listen to this episode here.

Survey Says is a weekly series rounding up the most important polling trends or data points you need to know about, plus a vibe check on a trend that’s driving politics or culture. In 2018, a Democrat named Kendra Horn scored the shock victory of the midterms, flipping a House district in Oklahoma that had been in Republican hands for 44 years. Just ahead of the election, FiveThirtyEight’…

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