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In late 1984, dozens of people in the region of Lake Tahoe, California, would go to the doctor with a variety of symptoms, including debilitating fatigue—the first clearly documented cluster of what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would label “chronic fatigue syndrome” towards the end of the ’80s.

Today, that complex condition is known as ME/CFS, or myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. In its more severe manifestations, it can leave people unable to get out of bed independently, needing to be tube-fed. Even in its minor forms, it can be life-altering.

I would know: I received an ME/CFS diagnosis in 2023. It’s not a rare condition—it’s estimated that around half of the millions of people with long Covid may have ME/CFS— but it is still widely misunderstood. Pushing oneself too hard to get “through” it, for one thing, doesn’t help build tolerance, and can instead lead to crashes known as post-exertional malaise.

Duke University cultural anthropologist Emily Lim Rogers looks at the labor it takes simply to exist while sick in her new book Sick Work: Exhaustion, Labor, and Invisible Illness, through the lens of ME/CFS. We spoke about the history of the condition, the importance of acknowledging differently racialized experiences of chronic illness, and the compounding exhaustion of being ill.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How has debilitating fatigue been downplayed since the Industrial Revolution, and how does that connect to work?

In the US, we have an idea that it’s normal to be burnt out. Fatigue and burnout are systemically denied from workers’ compensation claims; this is actually not the case in all countries.

“Fatigue is this term that’s so banal and non-exceptional. We accept it as completely mundane and something that everyone should be: fatigued.”

The concept of fatigue was initially conceived of as something that could be solved, particularly in the context of an understanding of the body as a machine, in the late 19th century. Fatigue did not enter English-language medical journals until the last decade of the 19th century. The first chapter of the book looks at how fatigue went from a problem that could be solved, and should be worked on—granted, for maximum productivity—to something that just became accepted as part of everyday life.

Stress was a concept that only gained widespread acceptance as a legitimate scientific phenomenon in the 1970s.

When I was looking at people with ME/CFS contemporarily, one might expect to find sort of a paradigm of hysteria [and dismissal on that basis], like women’s chronic illnesses are obviously disproportionately affected by chronic fatigue syndrome. But what I found was that most people were not dismissed as kind of crazy hysterics—though that certainly echoes as well—but from an idea that they were just working too hard.

But then, that’s interesting, because our solution is not, “Maybe we should give these people disability insurance, maybe we should give these people time off work.” Instead, it’s, “You cannot handle the conditions of everyday life under capitalism. You’re just fatigued. You’re just burnt out.”

Now, people with ME/CFS have a qualitatively different type of fatigue than fatigue from work. [But] I think if we were to challenge the idea that some people have debilitating fatigue in addition to other non-specific symptoms, it would fundamentally raise the question of: Should we all be tired all the time in the first place?

You write that “Sick work is not about rehabilitation into the workforce or the reproduction of labor power: It is treading water with a body that has already been rendered unproductive.” That really hit me hard. In what ways do you think the capitalist society we live in degrades the amount of work it takes for chronically ill people, whether they have ME/CFS or another condition, to survive?

Part of my argument is that we call these illnesses “invisible illnesses,” because you can’t necessarily tell that someone’s sick. That’s true, but, for some people, it’s very much not invisible. I would describe these illnesses as invisibleized, more accurately. And part of my argument is that the invisible labor, and the invisibilization of the labor, that it takes to be sick leads to the invisibilization, and minimization politically, of many diseases like ME/CFS.

“In US culture, we have a huge kind of panic over the idea that someone is faking it.”

The work and everyday labor of living with ME/CFS contains this recursive loop of everyday labor of being ill, where you can’t work, but you need to work.

The engine of capitalism, as I describe in the [book], is fatigue: the depletion of bodily capacity to its absolute limit. If all of that is depleted in simply trying to be okay, then you’re already rendered outside the fold of who we think of as a productive worker. Many people, as I show in the book, do have ME/CFS and have to work paid jobs because they have to get health insurance, but they’re barely treading water. And the only reason, for many people, is because work is their only tie to health insurance, which is the cruel irony of this whole system.

You note that some ME/CFS patient activists believe the CDC used the name “chronic fatigue” to downplay its severity.

I read about it in some early reporting on ME/CFS in the ’90s. I think the question of intentionality is maybe less salient than the question of its effect. Fatigue is this term that’s so banal and non-exceptional. We accept it as completely mundane and something that everyone should be: fatigued.

For people with ME/CFS, a very different type, a very, very debilitating type of fatigue that does not come proportionate to any exertion, kind of gets buried in that. It’s important to look at the nitty-gritty of the science, why something’s researched or not researched. But zooming out, I try to understand this as very deeply embedded into how capitalism operates for chronically ill people at large.

How have ME/CFS patients been dismissed owing to the lack of clear, consistent biomarkers for the condition? 

Many people would look at people with ME/CFS, especially those very active in the patient activist movement, and say, “Oh, these are a bunch of bougie white women”—and that’s true in terms of who can get a diagnosis. We would say that the bourgeois white woman is so opposite of the figure of the welfare queen, the person who wants a cop-out from work, right?

I actually think these figures are not completely distinct, because in US culture, we have a huge kind of panic over the idea that someone is faking it, and thus taking taxpayer dollars, and just lazy.

“Many people of color that I talk to didn’t even consider that they might have ME/CFS…People can really internalize: Am I worthy to be ill, or am I not?”

I think that the lack of biomarkers creates that panic, and biomarkers became the idea of objective proof of illness and became more important in disability determinations in the neoliberal era.

We saw it in the gutting of the social safety net under Reagan, continuing obviously under Clinton, and this is obviously very relevant to what we’re seeing now with all of the cuts in Medicaid. What we have or don’t have [reduced to] biomarkers is political, and how that meets and meshes with actual everyday interactions in the disability determinations office, with health insurance companies, is sort of a distillation of all that. All those sources come crashing in [together] to shape the dismissal of ME/CFS.

As you mentioned, ME/CFS has often been portrayed as a rich white women’s disease, which is just not accurate. Could you tell me about your takeaways from your conversation with Robin, a Black woman with ME/CFS?

Not only was there the shocking anecdote that even a Black doctor would tell her, “No, just keep pushing on,” it raised a larger point. It is always about who has the money, resources, and time to go and get an ME/CFS diagnosis—but there’s also something where it cuts deeper, to who sees themselves as someone who can be legitimately ill.

The portrayal of ME/CFS as a bourgeois white woman’s disease does not help. Many people of color that I talk to didn’t even consider that they might have ME/CFS, so I think people can really internalize: Am I worthy to be ill, or am I not? And should I just push on, or should I not?

In his crusade to undermine American democracy, Donald Trump doesn’t have to win to win. He only needs to create a mess.

Look at this week’s news. There were several court actions regarding Trump’s outrageous attempt to restrict mail-in voting for the midterms. The back-and-forth was confusing, as the Supreme Court undid a lower court’s decision that had blocked key components of Trump’s plan. The US Postal Service then announced it would proceed with Trump’s scheme, but a federal judge subsequently issued a temporary restraining order that prevented the USPS from moving ahead. The legal fight is continuing, with mail-in voting due to begin within several weeks in some states.

So…chaos. Which is what Trump desires. Surely, he wants to succeed in severely limiting mail-in balloting—an obsession of his that seems patently unconstitutional, given that the founders handed the authority to run and oversee national elections only to the states and Congress. But he also triumphs if his shenanigans foster uncertainty.

It will be a disaster for democracy should Trump manage to win this legal battle and limit mail-in voting

Many voters do not follow the ins and outs of electoral law. As with most issues, they hear and see snatches of news and miss key developments and important details. It can be tough to be fully informed on this front. But if voters receive the impression that mail-in ballots might not count, might not be permitted, or might expose a voter to extra scrutiny, some voters might not bother to vote or might be intimidated from voting.

It will be a disaster for democracy should Trump manage to win this legal battle and limit mail-in voting. Eight states run elections primarily by mail: California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington. So does Washington, DC. And several other states rely heavily on mail-in ballots. But even if the courts ultimately reject his assault on postal voting, the confusion he’s sowing could, to a degree, subvert the election.

Trump’s attack on mail-in ballots is only one front in his war on voting. He already has succeeded in pushing Republicans to gerrymander congressional districts ahead of schedule to tilt the playing field this year toward the GOP. The Trump administration also just announced it will deploy 1,000 election monitors to voting sites in November.

Past administrations have sent out monitors without causing disruptions. But given Trump’s adversarial stance toward state election authorities and his ceaseless pushing of bogus election conspiracy theories, there’s reason to worry that mischief and voter intimidation could be prompted by his supposed monitors.

There also has been speculation among Trump detractors that he might resort to stationing troops, National Guard forces, or ICE agents at polling places to scare off voters.

One cause for concern: The Justice Department’s civil rights division has apparently hired for its election monitoring project a lawyer named David Michael Levin, who in 2016 was charged in Florida with three felonies for allegedly hacking into government election sites. According to Democracy Docket, the charges were reduced to two misdemeanors, and he pleaded guilty and served 20 days in jail. Moreover, Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the civil rights division, which is responsible for election monitoring, is a 2020 election denier who pushed Trump’s false claims about that contest. Having her head an election monitoring mission would be like placing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of the nation’s vaccine policies. Oh…wait.

There also has been speculation among Trump detractors that he might resort to stationing troops, National Guard forces, or ICE agents at polling places to scare off voters. If anything like this happens, Trump and the GOP will argue that citizens entitled to vote have no reason to fear the presence of ICE agents. But since ICE agents have rounded up American citizens—and often acted violently—their appearance at these sites would likely keep some voters away. Who wants to risk being erroneously apprehended or getting caught up in a violent ICE action—just for exercising their constitutional right to vote?

Such speculation is far from idle. Bobby Charles, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Maine, recently said he would ask White House border czar Tom Homan to send ICE agents to the state’s polling stations. (In July, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian national, was shot and killed by ICE agents in Biddeford, Maine. He was mistakenly targeted by ICE agents who were looking for his roommate.) Trump and his minions don’t have to dispatch ICE on Election Day to frighten away voters; a public discussion of this prospect could be enough to keep some voters at home.

It’s so damn obvious but still deserves saying: Nothing this administration states about voting should be taken at face value.

Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, has said that he would not deploy ICE agents to intimidate voters, but there’s no reason to accept his promise. After all, Trump and his entire administration have been promoting the baseless lie that election fraud is rampant and noncitizen voting is a significant problem. In a speech in July, Trump declared that DHS had identified 250,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls of four states. But since then, DHS has not been able to produce proof of this, and it has even acknowledged that the number was inflated.

It’s so damn obvious but still deserves saying: Nothing this administration states about voting should be taken at face value. Pushing his Big Lie about the 2020 election, Trump nearly annihilated the nation’s constitutional order. He mounted a disinformation campaign to discredit legitimate voting results and incited violence to stay in power. After that, screwing around with the midterms is peanuts for him. No one should be surprised that he will use whatever power he now has to rig the coming elections in his favor. All media coverage of his assault on mail-in voting and his other attempts to reduce voting participation should be presented within the context that Trump is a clear and present threat to democracy.

The US electoral system is a crazy quilt of state and local election authorities. It won’t be easy for Trump to meddle in hundreds of contests across the country—especially in Democratic-led states. Mail-in ballots may be his best shot. But with only 19 House seats deemed toss-ups at this point, Trump and his crew will only have to interfere in a handful of races to help his Republican cultists remain in charge of Congress.

These coming elections are not only significant because control of the legislative branch is at stake at a time of crisis. They will demonstrate whether the United States can have free and fair elections or whether Trump and the GOP will prevail in their ongoing endeavor to impose minority rule on America.

Donald Trump has decided to take another sledgehammer to the White House—this time on the taxpayer’s dime.

The General Services Administration, under the White House’s guidance, has awarded government contracts to renovate the two-lane Harry S. Truman Bowling Alley in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Politico reported Monday. On July 28, the GSA awarded nearly $253,000 to Charles Mann Enterprises to do some lighting work in the exclusive recreational spot. Weeks later, on August 18, the agency awarded the contractor another $8,800 for escort services to shuttle workers in and out of sensitive government areas.

Somehow, the development has not rattled budget-conscious Republicans in the slightest, despite the party’s previous aversion to the site’s renovation.

The last major renovation project proposed for the bowling alley was announced under President Barack Obama in 2014. At the time, the GSA told Time magazine that the lanes needed a rebuild as they were “irreparable.”

Hours after the article’s publication, the proposed renovation turned into a Washington brouhaha. Republican opposition to the remodel forced the GSA to cancel the project, and the Republican-controlled House went so far as to adopt an amendment prohibiting funding from being used to renovate the bowling alley.

Former Representative Pat Meehan called the renovation a “want,” not a “need.” Former Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus made a similar mockery of the proposed rebuild on Twitter, publishing a list of crossed-out governmental funding needs such as the economy and “securing the border.”

“Repair WH Bowling Alley✓,” Priebus wrote at the time.

But Republicans in Trump’s second term are comparatively nonplussed by the MAGA leader’s inordinate and unnecessary spending. Beyond the bowling alley job, Trump has razed the White House East Wing, started construction on a $600 million ballroom (the price of which keeps growing), gutted the Lincoln bathroom, transformed the Palm Room from a lush green foyer into a sterile lobby, and mowed down Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s famous Rose Garden in order to pave “paradise.”

The administration has also spent more than $16 million on an unsuccessful and rushed renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, announced plans for a 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery (estimated at more than $100 million), indiscriminately axed trees in the Washington area, and destroyed the Kennedy Center facade. It is also reportedly planning to destroy some 13 historic buildings on the grounds of former psychiatric hospital St. Elizabeths in order to expand facilities for the Department of Homeland Security.

US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is set to depart the Pentagon in the next few days, following a months-long feud with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the firings of several top officials and allegedly blocking many of his innovation projects like streamlined technology adoption. 

The Wall Street Journal was the first to report the news on Monday.

Driscoll’s resignation after serving for 18 months leaves the US Army effectively without a senior leader. Hegseth fired Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George in April and has not nominated a replacement.

Hegseth has cut down the number of top military officials in his Defense Department. According to Military Times, since taking his post last January, he presided over the firings and early departures of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of naval operations, the Army’s vice chief of staff, and the commander of the US Army in Europe and Africa, among others. 

While it’s unclear which firings Driscoll took issue with, Hegseth also fired the only two women serving as four-star officers and blocked promotions for several female and Black Navy officers, seemingly under his anti-diversity push. In early 2025, Hegseth said the firings were “a reflection of the president wanting the right people around him to execute the national-security approach we want to take.”

“Secretary Driscoll has been highly effective in advancing President Trump’s agenda to Make America Strong Again at the Department of the Army by providing outstanding leadership during historic military operations, restoring an emphasis on readiness and lethality, assisting with negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, and more,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement. (Noting the emphasis on lethality.) 

Driscoll took his worries about the Army’s future under Hegseth’s leadership directly to President Trump, four people familiar with the discussion told The Atlantic, given the series of firings of top officers. One of the people said that Trump was surprised and expressed concern.

Hegseth is reportedly considering his chief spokesperson, Sean Parnell—who also allegedly abused his estranged wife and children—to succeed Driscoll. As I pointed out on Monday, Parnell criticized the Washington Post’s reporting that cited classified documents in which top military officials stated that the current war in Iran is depleting their ability to defend the US from other threats, baselessly claiming on Sunday that publishing the report was “a crime” and evidence of Trump and Pete Derangement Syndrome. 

This all looks like a move to replace officers who push back on Hegseth’s policies with loyalists.

Pierre Damas Bel, a 20-year-old Haitian immigrant, stepped into traffic in Springfield, Ohio, Monday and was killed. His family believes it was a suicide after he lost his Temporary Protected Status.

Ohio State Highway Patrol officials reported that Bel had pulled his car over on the right shoulder of I-70 Monday morning and then walked directly into oncoming traffic. He was struck by a large tractor-trailer and died from his injuries at the scene.

Bel had reportedly been distraught after he, like dozens of Haitians in Springfield, was called to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office to be fitted with an ankle monitor following the end of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians. Springfield is home to a Haitian community of about 15,000, and a June Supreme Court decision permitted the Trump administration to cancel their TPS protections, despite the ongoing violence and insecurity in Haiti. Without TPS, Haitian residents have been ordered to wear ankle monitors and travel no further than 75 miles from their homes.

“I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone,” Bel wrote on Instagram on July 30. “Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”

Bel was a recent honors high school graduate and a proud cadet in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. He had just started classes as a freshman at Wright State University, where he wanted to study medicine and play soccer.

After being fitted with the ankle monitor, he was reportedly not given a JROTC uniform and could no longer comfortably play soccer.

“In his last days, I did not recognize him as he was such an energetic kid who loves life, friends and family, and education,” the 20-year-old’s father, Pierre Ronal Bel, told The Haitian Times. “It was his first week of classes, but he didn’t feel like he was learning because he was traumatized, so it’s because of ICE’s ankle monitor.… He would wear long pants or jeans whenever he went out so people wouldn’t make fun of him or look at him differently.”

“He felt like he was treated like an animal,” the grieving father added in a statement to The Washington Post.

Bel’s death has shocked and traumatized the Haitian community in Springfield and beyond. This is the same Haitian enclave that President Trump accused of eating cats and dogs on the campaign trail in 2024, and the community has been living in terror ever since the administration canceled TPS. Bel was scheduled for an asylum hearing in October, and reportedly did not want to return to Haiti due to the violence that caused his parents to flee in 2021.

“I’m supposed to be forgiving,” the Bel family’s pastor in Springfield, Carl Ruby, told the Post. “But right now as I sit with a broken family, I’m crying out to God for righteous judgment in those who made this happen.”

Former Customs and Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino—who oversaw some of the Trump administration’s most violent immigration actions—was under internal investigation for allegedly lying about misconduct and antisemitic remarks when he retired back in March.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Bovino’s investigation was triggered by Judge Sarah Ellis, who last year called him out for lying on the stand about being hit in the head with a rock by protesters, which he used to justify his brutal use of tear gas against American citizens.

“I find the defendant’s evidence simply not credible,” Ellis said at the time. “Agents pushed, shoved, tackled protesters, pointed guns at them, threw tear gas and deployed smoke canisters. Everyone that agents detained [was] released by the FBI, and none of them are currently charged with assault.”

An internal federal investigator asked Bovino to answer questions about Ellis’s ruling in March just weeks before he retired. In that same inquiry, Bovino was also asked to respond to allegations that he used antisemitic language on a conference call in January. When Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen, an Orthodox Jew, couldn’t make the call due to the Sabbath, a frustrated Bovino allegedly said “Do Orthodox criminals also take off on Saturday?” and used the term “chosen people” in a negative connotation.

Bovino’s tenure as CBP head was absolutely horrific. He tear-gassed men, women, and children. He called Latino immigrants “scum,” “filth,” and “trash,” while identifying as Native American (he is Italian American). Most notably, he claimed that Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, had intended to harm the CBP officers who shot him 10 times while he was pinned to the ground with his gun holstered. Since his exit, Bovino has accused the Trump administration of wanting him killed, and Trump himself of betraying his mass immigration goals.

On Monday, an Obama-appointed federal judge ruled that New York State could not enforce its 2024 Climate Change Superfund Act, a landmark law that would have charged fossil fuel companies $75 billion over 25 years for climate damages from cumulative greenhouse gas emissions. 

In a 63-page opinion, Chief Judge Brenda Sannes of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York sided with 22 Republican state attorneys general, as well as industry groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, American Petroleum Institute, and National Mining Association, saying the state’s “sprawling” superfund act was preempted by the federal Clean Air Act and outside the jurisdiction of New York. 

“The Climate Act is an unusual and sweeping statute, designed to address the effects of climate change–a ‘uniquely international problem of national concern’,” Sannes wrote. “Thus, the Court finds the Climate Act is ‘simply beyond the limits of state law.’” Her decision follows a July hearing where Sannes sharply questioned whether she was constrained by an earlier 2021 decision in which New York sued five fossil fuel groups for climate damages from climate change, such as sea level rise. Her August 31 opinion relied heavily on this case. 

New York’s climate superfund legislation, passed in 2024, required fossil fuel companies to pay for climate change adaptive infrastructure projects, like upgrades to roads, transit systems, the electric grid, stormwater drainage, and sewage treatment plants, as well as design solutions to mitigate extreme heat. 

Climate litigation experts criticized the legal rationale behind Sannes’ decision. “The [2021] Second Circuit NYC decision is not binding precedent in this case,” said Patrick Parenteau, a law professor and Climate Policy Fellow at Vermont Law School. “It has been severely criticized by other federal and state courts. Judge Sannes should not feel bound by it.” 

Meanwhile, the Trump administration, which over the last year and a half has enacted its deregulatory “energy dominance” agenda and has rolled back a host of environmental rules, like the 2009 endangerment finding, commended the ruling. 

“The Department of Justice is delivering on President Trump’s order to protect American energy from state overreach,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson in a Department of Justice press release. “New York’s law would have expropriated $75 billion from energy companies around the world during an energy emergency and in direct defiance of American foreign policy and federal law. We will continue to fight for affordable, reliable energy for all Americans.” 

Gustafson is head of the recently rebranded Energy and Natural Resources Division, and under his watch, the DOJ filed a similar lawsuit last year supporting attorneys general in New York as well as Vermont, which passed the very first state climate superfund legislation in May 2024. Vermont was first sued by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute in December of that year.

In 2026, 13 other states have considered passing similar “polluters pay” laws. Despite wide public support, organizers in blue states considering their own bills are seeing opposition from state Republicans, business groups, and trade associations. New Jersey Senator Michael Testa released a statement saying his state “should pay close attention” to New York’s ruling. “Our state’s similar bill should go no further. It’s a waste of time and resources.” 

At the time of publication, New York’s Attorney General Letitia James has not yet filed an appeal over Sannes’ ruling. Separately, it is unclear when and how Vermont’s case will be decided, but both decisions may inform how other states draft and pass future climate superfund laws. 

Environmental advocates stress that New York’s ruling “doesn’t bind” other states from passing their own superfund laws, and that the burning of fossil fuels will continue to cause mounting climate damages. “The floods will still come, roads will still wash out, and communities will still need billions to protect themselves,” said Make Polluters Pay Communications Director Cassidy DiPaola in an emailed press release. “Those costs don’t disappear just because fossil fuel companies don’t want to pay them.”

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Inside Washington

The media are paying attention to the wrong Massachusetts Dem primary

As Massachusetts voters head to the polls for the primary election on Tuesday, the race between incumbent Senator Ed Markey and his younger, more moderate challenger Representative Seth Moulton continues to receive the most attention, even though 80-year-old Markey is nearly certain to win. The race to replace Moulton in the 6th congressional district, on the other hand, is wide open, serving as a microcosm of some of the issues troubling Democrats across the country.

The two front-runners in the five-candidate MA-6 race are Tram Nguyen and Dan Koh. John Beccia, who is self-funding his campaign, could have a chance but appears to be decidedly behind the former two candidates.

In some ways, the race seems a classic matchup between an insurgent progressive and an establishment moderate. Nguyen “is the more progressive, the more grassroots, the more walking the streets, knocking on doors” candidate, said Erin O’Brien, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “That’s the easy frame to understand her.” Meanwhile, Koh is “a good Democrat,” she said, “more or less a moderate, lots of D.C. connections.”

But perhaps more importantly, the MA-6 race showcases the nationwide split between anti-Trump resistance Democrats (like Koh) and affordability-focused candidates (like Nguyen) who want to create a message that moves beyond Trump. That divide has already played out this primary season, notably in Alex Vindman’s loss to state Representative Angie Nixon in the Florida Senate primary. Vindman gained a national profile for his testimony during the 2019 Trump impeachment inquiry, and made this a focus of his campaign. Other impeachment leaders, like Representatives Diana DeGette and Dan Goldman, lost their races to progressive challengers.

Koh, who served as deputy assistant to former President Joe Biden and deputy director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, has earned the endorsement of both Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris. Nguyen has been a state representative since 2019 and has earned endorsements from state progressives like Representatives Ayanna Pressley and Lori Trahan, as well as state House Speaker Ronald Mariano and state Speaker Pro Tempore Kate Hogan. Her endorsements aren’t just the typical progressive names, which could give her an edge.

“There aren’t necessarily a ton of places in America where people are breaking out the Biden name-drop,” said David Hopkins, a professor of political science at Boston College. But given the more moderate makeup of the 6th district, Koh’s “calculation” to emphasize the Biden connection “may be a correct one,” Hopkins added.

The district includes the northern suburbs of Boston, and is rated D+11 by the Cook Partisan Voter Index. It’s clearly a Democrat-dominated district, and the winner of today’s election is expected to win the general election against Republican Micah Jones. But the district is a far cry from the progressive urban strongholds of Boston and Cambridge. It’s an older, suburban, more middle-income district, which elected the decidedly moderate Moulton six times.

Koh’s strategy seems to be, “I want to be the champion of normie Democrats who still think Joe Biden did a good job and still think Trump is the enemy,” said Hopkins. That strategy is evident as soon as you open Koh’s campaign website, which centers the slogan: “Fight Trump. Lower Costs.” The first three issues on his issues page are Fighting Trump’s Corruption, Protecting Democracy, and Abolish Trump’s ICE. Meanwhile, none of the policy points on Nguyen’s website mention Trump, and she focuses instead on economic justice issues.

At the end of the day, noted Ray La Raja, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the two candidates would likely support the same legislation in Congress on most issues. “She’s trying to run in the lane to the left because she thinks that’s where the energy is,” he said. “He interprets this race as people looking for a fighter.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

The National Park Service confirmed a second death on Monday in the Grand Canyon flash flood in Arizona that occurred over the weekend. As of Tuesday morning, one person remains missing, with some 80 people rescued in the past few days. The Park Service has said there is “no estimated reopening date” for the affected areas. The Washington Post’s Ben Knoll reports that while this is part of the expected monsoon season in Arizona, “a record-breaking El Niño and a marine heat wave in the Pacific Ocean have combined to load the atmosphere with moisture.… On the backdrop of climate change, these factors have driven atmospheric moisture levels 5 to 15 percent higher than average.” Meanwhile, the death toll from flash floods in Nepal and Tibet following a glacier collapse has climbed to over a thousand. Faced with billions of dollars of repairs, Nepal has reportedly appealed to the United Nations’ climate-disaster recovery fund for help.

The Ohio Capital Journal warns that after nearly a third of Affordable Care Act enrollees in the state dropped their marketplace plans following the GOP’s decision to let subsidies expire, the “smaller, sicker clientele” that remains will see their premiums rise an average of 14.7 percent for 2027. Ohio saw the “biggest enrollment drop of any state” following the subsidy expiration. Democrats are hoping to flip the governor’s mansion, a U.S. Senate seat, three U.S. House seats, and at least six Statehouse seats in Ohio.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

“Stop Doomscrolling. Do Something,” Democracy Forward president Skye Perryman urges New York Times readers. “Many of us confuse consuming political news, engaging on social media and participating in group chats with doing the things that we, as individuals, can do to help change our country’s trajectory,” Perryman writes in the paper’s opinion section. But twentieth-century political history, she argues, shows that “ordinary Americans” were the ones who pushed through major reforms. “We can organize our neighbors, work at local polling places or join community groups. We must not be satisfied with watching the decline of American democracy from our phones.”

In case you missed it: Public Citizen condemned the Trump administration’s announcement late last week that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration would be reversing an Obama-era rule establishing fuel efficiency standards for medium and heavy-duty truck engines. “This latest attempted rollback by Trump is yet another giveaway to the oil and gas industry, the effects of which will increase fuel costs for truckers and in turn, raise the cost of consumer goods,” said Public Citizen electric vehicle policy advocate Will Anderson in the organization’s statement.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Political Trivia Question of the Day

What two presidents (1) ordered the construction of the East and West Wings of the White House and (2) ordered and oversaw the East Wing’s significant expansion? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss was reportedly responsible for a blatantly racist news headline that tied Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed to the 9/11 terrorist attack.

The CBS article was headlined: “Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks.”

The story’s lede was even more offensive, grammatically suggesting that El-Sayed was somehow to blame for 9/11.

“As the nation prepares to mark 25 years since Sept. 11, 2001, Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, may be facing the risk of renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack,” the story began.

That same language was mirrored in an X post from the company’s official account.

The story critiqued several of El-Sayed’s since-deleted Covid-era tweets in which the former public health official compared the pandemic’s early death toll to the infamous terrorist attack and wrote that he hoped the ensuing government response would “spend the next ten years fighting a war for public health & against poverty.” (This was not controversial—many leaders and media outlets at the time compared Covid’s death toll to that of September 11.)

Ultimately, CBS News used the anniversary of 9/11 to damage the Muslim progressive’s chances in Michigan, even though the content of his posts was rather banal.

The Weiss-led network also suggested there was something sinister about the fact that El-Sayed had deleted the posts, even though his campaign has been public about the fact that he had deleted all his posts prior to 2023.

Status’s Oliver Darcy reported Tuesday that Weiss “personally directed” the Islamophobic language and was a driving force in shaping the story’s framing. According to Status, Weiss “praised” the story during CBS News’s daily editorial meeting, and signalled her support of the piece “to the entire network.” She also urged that the “headline be tweaked to specifically mention that El-Sayed had deleted tweets referencing the September 11 terrorist attacks,” according to CBS staffers that spoke with Status.

Senior CBS News staff brought the story to the standards department, though little was done about it due to Weiss’s personal involvement.

“They took a small nugget of news, forced into something much larger, and messed up,” one CBS News employee told Status.

A former senior CBS News staffer who heard about the situation from a former colleague told Status that the article was “shameful” and “the racism is overt.”

Weiss, the founder of the pro-Israel blog The Free Press and a former New York Times opinion columnist, was tapped to run CBS News late last year, despite the fact that she had never worked in broadcast news, lacked traditional reporting experience, and had also never run a major news operation.

Weiss’s business decisions atop the news giant have unequivocally and singlehandedly divorced CBS News from its decades-long place in America’s prestige news media circuit. What was once crowned the “gold standard” of broadcasting, and the home of some of journalism’s most venerable names such as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, has since devolved into a graveyard for journalistic ethics.

Under Weiss’s stewardship, CBS News has killed critical stories in order to save face for the Trump administration. The network has also lost a cadre of veteran journalists, ranging from 60 Minutes veteran executive producer Bill Owens, to Anderson Cooper, to the company’s de facto face, Scott Pelley.

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll—one of the highest ranking officials in the Defense Department—warned President Trump that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s mass purge of military leadership could have a negative impact on the Army’s “transformation and readiness,” according to The Atlantic. Then he resigned.

During their meeting, Trump was reportedly shocked when Driscoll told him just how many officials had been fired, stepped down, or not selected for promotion under Hegseth—something you’d think the president would already know about. Now, in the midst of a flailing war with Iran, the military is without its highest ranking civilian leader, two Senate-confirmed head generals, and a confirmed commander.

Driscoll and Hegseth have seemingly been at odds from the moment Trump appointed Hegseth to head the Pentagon. In April, The Hill reported that Hegseth saw Driscoll as a threat to his leadership given his connection to Vice President JD Vance and his more-traditional, less-aggressive leadership style—with Hegseth’s team going so far as to try and frame Driscoll as a “resistance figure” in an effort to oust him from the administration.

Hegseth had already eviscerated Driscoll’s support network, firing his chief of staff, Gen. Randy George, and two other high-ranking military officials in April. Driscoll’s Monday resignation was a long time coming, if nothing else. It’s unclear what exactly Hegseth’s problem with Driscoll was beyond paranoia and a lack of total capitulation.

“From what I’ve seen in the press, and from whatever it’s worth, what I hear from people in the Army, it’s not like Driscoll is scheming and plotting to make Hegseth look bad. I mean, Hegseth takes care of that himself on a regular basis. It’s just, it’s all just very strange. And it’s just irresponsible,” retired Army reserve colonel and Pentagon staffer Kevin Carroll told The Hill in April.

Either way, Driscoll is gone now, and Hegseth will have one less detractor to his vision of a reckless, hypermasculine, shoot-first-ask-questions-later military to reign supreme over.

A U.S. Postal Service official has accused the agency of defying court orders as it rushes to implement the Trump administration’s mail-in voting restrictions.

The allegations were made public Tuesday morning by way of a letter from Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal to Postmaster General David Steiner. Citing the insider’s testimony, Blumenthal said that the “risky and haphazard” implementation of President Donald Trump’s March executive order—which granted the postal service new gatekeeping responsibilities regarding mail-in ballots—could lead to a “catastrophic failure” in America’s voting procedures come November.

The executive order was in legal limbo for months—up until last week, when the Supreme Court decided that the lawsuit challenging the order was premature since the administration had not yet implemented it. The Supreme Court was clear that it had not ruled on the legality of Trump’s order, but nonetheless allowed it to move forward.

Still, the postal service’s plan to carry out the marching orders is already fraught with problems, according to the whistleblower report.

The snail-mail carrier has been building an entirely new federal ballot mail portal since June, months before the service was permitted to move forward with the executive order. The portal will screen all incoming ballots, but its development has been “rushed” and “risky” as the service tried to meet “impossible deadlines”.

For instance, the agency has eliminated testing procedures for the portal platform, a risk that could potentially “derail the midterm elections,” according to the whistleblower.

“Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” the official said.

Blumenthal told reporters by phone on Monday that “the main takeaway for me is that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans. One-third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the USPS puts all of their votes at risk.”

Voting by mail will invariably become more difficult for the tens of millions of Americans who depend on the service under Trump’s new order. Even if a voter does everything right, their vote could still be rejected by the Postal Service’s new portal.

Part of the problem is the system’s 0 percent failure rate, which processes ballots in large batches but rejects the lot if one fails to pass muster.

“For example, if a state election official brings a batch of 10,000 ballots to USPS and USPS is unable to match just one of those ballots against the portal—because, for example, someone has recently changed their name after marriage or they’ve moved—then USPS would refuse to mail the remaining 9,999 ballots as well,” Blumenthal wrote. USPS would then expect the state to “take back the entire batch to cure the issue with the single ballot,” according to the whistleblower.

The whistleblower claimed that developing such a portal and the infrastructure to support it should take the service a year or more, but USPS leadership nonetheless demanded that the electronic processor be launched by September 1—less than six months after the executive order was signed, and just two months before the midterm election cycle.

One judge had to build a safe room at home. Others were so scared they wouldn’t let their children play outside; another stopped grocery shopping and couldn’t attend his grandchild’s recital because of a 24/7 security detail. “I can’t leave my house at the same time or take the same routes” every day, the one with the safe room said, fearing that someone might follow behind.

Threats to the federal judiciary have skyrocketed under the second Trump administration, according to a new report by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which interviewed 35 sitting and retired federal judges, many of whom requested anonymity.

Many of the jurists said the job had become more dangerous partly because President Donald Trump and his allies verbally attack them for decisions on high-profile cases, leading to a surge in harassment from other people: After overseeing a contentious immigration case, the judge with the safe room got more than 700 threatening phone calls to their chambers. Others said they were “pizza-doxxed”—someone anonymously had pizzas delivered to their houses with threatening notes inside, including messages with the name Daniel Anderl, a 20-year-old who was murdered in 2000 by a gunman while his mom, Judge Esther Salas, served on the federal bench in New Jersey.

“We sign up for this. We are public servants,” one federal judge told the Brennan Center. “But our children don’t.”

“Threats to federal judges’ safety have always existed,” the Brennan Center authors wrote, “but their scope, frequency, and intensity have sharply increased over the past decade alongside the nation’s deepening political divisions.”

According to the US Marshals Services, the 2025 fiscal year saw a 57 percent uptick in “security incidents of significant concern” for federal judges, and the number was expected to keep rising. In July, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan reported that Supreme Court Police expected a 38 percent increase in threats to Supreme Court justices in 2026, after a 25 percent increase in 2025.

The annual average number of threats and hostile communications toward federal judges, prosecutors, judicial staff, and courts rose from 1,180 incidents in the decade before Trump’s first campaign to 3,810 in the seven years afterward, according to a Reuters report, with the number now at “unprecedented” levels. “In 40 years of judicial service,” US District Judge William G. Young told the Brennan Center, “I have never experienced an executive branch that is so overtly hostile to the federal judiciary—top to bottom.”

The Brennan Center report is striking for the sheer number of examples of harassment, and the candidness of judges who were interviewed. (Another report, also released on Monday by researchers at the law schools of University of California, Berkeley, and New York University, showed even more examples.) Some judges were victims of swatting—someone anonymously called the police to report a crisis at their home, triggering an armed response. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett recently recounted how her teenage son opened the door to discover police vehicles outside after someone falsely reported gunfire.

Others have received hate mail or faced intense online harassment: The judge with the safe room was inspired to build it because someone had posted their house’s floor plan on the internet. District Judge John Bates was threatened with an online image of a noose after Elon Musk posted photos of him and his wife. A May 2025 study found that online posts calling for violence or impeachment of judges increased 324 percent between May 2024 and March 2025.

Since Trump returned to office, more than 850 lawsuits have been filed to challenge the administration’s policies—and judges have at last partially blocked those policies in more than 150 cases, according to the Brennan Center. Judges said that for a while, cases involving the January 6 attack on the Capitol were the most likely to illicit threats, but lately immigration cases are the most dangerous. Many worried for their families. “We sign up for this. We are public servants,” Judge Beth Bloom of the Southern District of Florida, told the Brennan Center. “But our children don’t sign up for this.” Some judges wouldn’t let their kids go on social media, and others asked their loved ones to take different routes home.

Most of those interviewed said they needed more security. Some paid out of pocket for extra protection at home, and noted that security at courthouses had been underfunded. In 2021, the US Marshals Service, which protects federal judges, did “not have the resources or proactive threat detection capabilities” that it needed, according to an audit. Funding for federal court security stayed flat between the 2023 and 2025 fiscal years, but in February Congress increased it from $750 million to $892 million, the full amount requested by the judicial branch. “This was a positive and necessary development,” the Brennan Center wrote.

But other problems remain: The administration has reassigned some marshals from their judicial security jobs to immigration enforcement and other duties, and judges fear Trump will withdraw even more resources. Last week, my colleague Pema Levy reported that the Supreme Court is taking matters into its own hands and building up its own police force. The justices “keep ruling for Trump,” she wrote, “but don’t trust him to keep them safe.”

What will all of this do for judicial independence? Though judges told the Brennan Center that they would not be influenced in the courtroom by the growing threats outside it, some said it was hard to ignore the pressure, and they questioned how long they can keep living like this. Would they need to retire early?

“How many qualified great candidates are we losing because they are afraid to step into this arena?” said Judge Salas, whose son was killed by the gunman in 2020. Another judge added, “If this gets too bad, I’m going to stop.”

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

Summer is supposed to be the best time for fresh produce. Corn on the cob at the cookout. Berries plucked right from the vine. Salads on the cafe patio while you take an extra long lunch break because the weather and the food is that good.

But this year, summer’s harvest brought something much different than the flavorful dishes we’ve come to expect. Since May, the United States has seen more than 17,000 lab-confirmed cyclosporiasis cases. Before this summer’s massive outbreak, the country had never recorded more than a few hundred infections in a single year from this parasite, which can cause watery and at times explosive diarrhea.

And that isn’t the only bug invading Americans’ digestive tracts.

One person died from a listeria infection traced to ricotta cheese. Close to 100 people came down with salmonella from recalled eggs, while more than 400 people have gotten sick in a separate salmonella outbreak involving jalapeños. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration issued its highest urgency warning for frozen blueberries believed to be contaminated with E coli.

“Climate change has allowed pathogens like cyclospora…to expand from the tropic, subtropic lines into areas more north and south.”

And now several dozen people across 15 states have become ill after eating alfalfa sprouts in a new outbreak that involves salmonella and E coli. Four of them have been hospitalized.

It’s gotten so bad that one Washington Post columnist argued we should stop eating lettuce altogether. Experts have told me they were worried people might actually completely stop consuming vegetables—vital to any healthy diet—for fear of contracting cyclosporiasis and enduring a month of watery diarrhea. I personally avoided the bagged salad kits that provided me with many easy lunches on a workday.

While this spate of foodborne illness is especially bad, the worst may be yet to come.

It’s only natural to look for somebody to blame. Culpability has understandably fallen on the Trump administration and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who helms the US Department of Health and Human Services—especially after his deep staffing cuts at the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the two federal agencies most responsible for investigating and responding to disease outbreaks. Those cuts have slowed the response, and officials have struggled to communicate with the public clearly in a fast-moving crisis.

While our government officials are partly to blame, the problem is bigger than Trump and Kennedy, or even this one summer. While seasonal changes will always play a role—the warmer months, when people eat more fresh produce and consume more food that’s been sitting out at unsafe temperatures, typically have more foodborne illnesses—the underlying factors contributing to these outbreaks are becoming more potent. The food supply is more and more globalized. And the planet continues to warm, allowing these pathogens to spread to more and more farms all over the world, including in the US.

As the weather finally begins to cool down, I’ve been asking myself an uncomfortable question: What if diarrhea summer never really ends?

Our globalized food supply chain has a lot to do with our food safety—and that isn’t going to change any time soon. Americans expect access to any produce they want year-round, even produce that isn’t in-season locally, or that may not grow anywhere in the US at all. We source food from all over the world: Most cyclospora outbreaks originated with foods grown in other countries. This year’s crisis was eventually linked to iceberg lettuce from Mexico.

And as the New York Times recently documented, the sometimes international trip from the farm to the store for a bagged salad kit offers multiple moments for potential contamination, including tainted irrigation water, local wildlife excrement, and poor storage practices, making it possible for dangerous pathogens to take hold before a person even buys their groceries.

This is a problem that is going to become worse, not better.

Warming temperatures around the world are also helping those bugs spread. Humidity is essential for salmonella and warmer summers will mean more humid-favorable conditions for the bacteria to grow. E coli likewise will thrive as temperatures rise. Cyclospora has historically been found in subtropical climates, so for a long time, infections from food grown inside the United States were unheard of. Not anymore.

“Climate change has allowed pathogens like cyclospora…to expand from the tropic, subtropic lines into areas more north and south of that tropic line,” said Joseph Eisenberg, a professor of epidemiology and global public health at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

“With respect to the US, we’re starting to see new infectious diseases in southern Louisiana, Texas; that also increases the presence of cyclospora in food systems in other countries,” he said. “It suggests that, through climate change, we might potentially start seeing it be endemic in the United States at some point.”

And indeed, cyclospora was found in farms in Florida in 2020. This is a problem that is going to become worse, not better, given the expected trends in global warming in the decades to come.

“It wasn’t until about within the last 10 years we started to see cases from domestic origin,” Francisco Diez-Gonzalez, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, told me. “Before, there were predominantly cases due to international travel or importation of products because it used to be endemic in some tropical or warmer climates.”

“It’s clear that now,” he said, “it’s become established in the domestic environment.”

To make matters worse, at the same time conditions for foodborne illness are ripening, the US government has been sharply cutting its ability to monitor for and respond to these outbreaks.

At the beginning of the second Trump administration, as part of the widespread government staffing cuts, the FDA laid off 3,500 workers. Between the FDA and the US Department of Agriculture, which also oversees food safety, and several related agencies, more than 11,000 workers have been lost, a 22 percent cut, according to the Partnership for Public Service. And the CDC, which helps respond to outbreaks once they start, has lost about a quarter of its workforce from January 2025 to October 2025, according to Reuters; by this summer, CBS reported, the number of scientists tracking food parasites at the agency dropped from 11 to three. Meanwhile, the administration has been rushing to hire 2,200 people in the middle of the crisis.

Former FDA officials have described a “brain drain” for the food safety programs that won’t be easy to reverse.

“There have been a lot of federal cuts. There have been cuts around CDC surveillance, around state and local public health. You’ve lost people,” Dr. Anurag Malani, vice chief of staff at Trinity Health’s Ann Arbor, Michigan, campus, told me. “The ability to do what you need to do to keep citizens safe and to keep the public safe, we don’t have as many people doing that as we used to.

The federal government also shut down several national monitoring programs for foodborne illness in 2025—including for the cyclospora parasite specifically. The state and local agencies that surveil for and respond to food outbreaks have also faced staff cuts because they depend on the federal government for their funding.

“It’s hard when there is one larger entity kind of controlling all of that,” Dr. Kathleen Linder, the hospital epidemiologist at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Ann Arbor, told me in July. “Local health departments are having to do more on their own than they would have had to do in the past just because of decentralization at that level. It has been very hard to get updated information. The information has been lagging a little bit behind.”

Food safety is hard enough to tackle on its own. Part of the reason we experience regular outbreaks of cyclospora is that it can successfully infect people even when only very little of it is present, and because we can’t grow it in a lab to study it.

But the US has made things harder by cutting these important programs. Rebuilding the staff and capacity to do this work is not likely to happen under the Trump administration, and former FDA officials have described a “brain drain” for the food safety programs that won’t be easy to reverse in the next administration.

But something will have to be done if we’re ever to escape the food recall cycle. Despite the name, food has historically been neglected by the “Food and Drug” Administration, and better food safety could require serious restructuring and investment in these capabilities. And foodborne illnesses aren’t the only kind of infection that climate change will make more likely: The United States is also seeing the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue. Responding to those new threats is going to require a rebuilt and potentially reimagined federal public health apparatus.

If there is any good news in the short term, it’s that there are a lot of great recipes for grilling your vegetables to eliminate any pathogens hiding in our side dishes at next summer’s cookouts. It sure seems like we’re going to need them.

South Carolina Representative Jim Clyburn endorsed calls to expand the Supreme Court over the weekend, reflecting a growing resolve among Democratic officials to do what they considered unthinkable a decade ago and fairly unpalatable as recently as five years ago. “I think we are in a position now that calls for some significant actions taken by the Congress and we ought to expand, and thirteen is a pretty good number,” Clyburn, the House Minority Whip, told Meet the Press host Kristen Welker. “A baker’s dozen, it would be a good number to have on the court.”

Clyburn is not the only prominent Democrat to endorse Supreme Court expansion in recent years. Former Vice President Kamala Harris, the party’s 2024 standard-bearer, also agreed that Congress should add four more seats to match the thirteen federal circuit courts of appeal. (The First through Eleventh Circuits hear cases from the fifty states, while the D.C. Circuit hears cases from the nation’s capital and the confusingly named Federal Circuit hears specialized appeals on patents and whatnot.)

Support from Clyburn stands out because he is, as Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall notes, the first member of Democratic congressional leadership to endorse the idea. That would, in turn, give cover for more rank-and-file members to support court expansion. Clyburn is also, notably, not exactly a radical member of the Democrats’ upper ranks. In 2020, his support helped swing the Democratic preisdential primary toward then-candidate Joe Biden, the most moderate choice in the race at that time.

I do not know whether the justices particularly care about Clyburn’s position on anything. But they should take stock of what it reflects: a deep and implacable desire among Democrats to break the conservatives’ grip on the Supreme Court through extraordinary means. I cannot stress enough how much the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has brought this on themselves.

The turning point in the high court’s trajectory came in 2018, when Justice Anthony Kennedy retired from the Supreme Court. Kennedy was the last remaining Republican appointee who was not, strictly speaking, a member of the conservative legal movement. He did not identify as an originalist or a textualist, instead hewing (for better or for worse) to his own idiosyncratic vision of how the Constitution should be interpreted. Thanks to the vicissitudes of fate, he also served as the court’s median justice from 2005 until his retirement.

In that role, Kennedy maintained an ideological balance of power of sorts on the high court. It was still undoubtedly a conservative Supreme Court. He wrote or joined some of the most consequential decisions of the era, from 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC to 2013’s Shelby County v. FEC. In less high-profile cases involving federalism and regulatory power, he was more likely to join his fellow conservatives than not.

At the same time, Kennedy also moved in ways that led to major liberal victories or prevented major defeats to the causes they support. Kennedy voted to uphold some restrictions on abortion over the years, but declined to provide the fifth vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. He regularly sided with the court’s four liberals to protect affirmative action in higher education and to narrow the scope of capital punishment. Most notably, Kennedy played a singular role in advancing LGBT rights in the Constitution from the 1990s onward, culminating in the landmark 2015 decision that struck down same-sex marriage bans nationwide.

The Kennedy Court, as one might call it, was a conservative court where many liberals could still expect that they would get a fair shake. Kennedy’s moderating presence also ensured that the court did not drift too far to the right. Conservative litigants and interest groups presented narrower arguments and positions to advance their causes ten years ago, fearing overreach and adverse rulings. Everybody who brought their case before the high court had reason to believe they might win.

Now nobody thinks they do. Public approval of the high court has cratered in recent years, fueled by growing dissatisfaction on the right and outright hostility on the left. Only 33 percent of Americans said they approved of the high court’s job performance in July, according to Gallup. Almost nine in ten Democrats registered their disapproval, along with two-thirds of independents and just above 40 percent of Republican voters.

Gallup’s survey is instructive in other ways, particularly about trends on the right. The modern-day nadir for conservative support came in July 2015, when a mere 18 percent of Republicans told Gallup that they approved of the court’s work. One can hardly blame them. The 2014-2015 term was the apex of the Kennedy Court’s liberalism, with banner victories on gay rights, climate change, gerrymandering reform, and the like. But their outrage didn’t last. Two years later it had rebounded to 67 percent and three years later it cracked 72 percent, even as the court remained temporarily deadlocked by Antonin Scalia’s death in 2016.

After Kennedy retired and Justice Brett Kavanaugh replaced him, a brief two-year interregnum saw Chief Justice John Roberts in the pilot’s seat. Again the court lurched to the right. In 2019, for example, Roberts closed the doors of federal courthouses to partisan-gerrymandering claims after two decades of reluctance from Kennedy to constitutionalize the sordid practice. Even then, there still seemed to be a handbrake on the court: Roberts voted to uphold an abortion-related precedent in 2020 that he had voted against a few years earlier.

Then Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020 and Republicans rushed to install Justice Amy Coney Barrett the following month on the eve of the presidential election. Now the conservatives were fully and completely in control of the court, and everything began to change as soon as right-wing litigants could get the right cases to the nine justices. This happened to coincide with the collapse of Democratic control of Congress and the Biden administration’s practical ability to pressure the court through expansion proposals, which were buried with a presidential commission shortly after he took office.

Roe v. Wade was overturned two years later. Affirmative action in college admissions fell the year after that. So too did the last glimmers of nonpartisanship. The justices rewrote the Fourteenth Amendment’s Disqualification Clause to pave the way for Trump to run for a second term despite his plain-text ineligibility, and blocked federal courts from considering the question again if he won. The conservative majority invented presidential immunity out of thin air in the summer of 2024, freeing Trump from an election-eve criminal trial and setting the stage for his second-term corruption and criminality.

Roberts, who once vowed in 2005 to only call “balls and strikes,” ruled that the president could climb into the stands and bludgeon people to death with a baseball bat. Sean Wilentz, a prominent historian of the early republic, compared Trump v. United States to Dred Scott v. Sandford. That infamous 1857 decision that struck down the Missouri Compromise, ruled that free and enslaved Black people could never be citizens, and precipitated the Civil War. In a similar way, Wilentz wrote, the court’s immunity ruling “has radically changed the very structure of American government, paving the way for MAGA authoritarianism just as the Taney Court tried to pave the way for enshrining the Slave Power.”

Clyburn also invoked the specter of Roger B. Taney, Roberts’ distant predecessor as chief justice, and Dred Scott in Sunday’s interview. His support for court expansion came because the Supreme Court “has decided to reverse course and take this country back to those rulings of Justice Taney, that said, ‘No Black man has any right that white man must respect,’” a paraphrasing of one of Taney’s most infamous lines in the 1857 ruling. That is likely a reference to the court’s shameful decision earlier this year in Louisiana v. Callais.

In a 6-3 ruling along the usual lines, the court’s conservative majority completed its demolition of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by making it virtually impossible to challenge racial gerrymandering under Section 2 of the historic law. Southern state legislatures practically sprinted over the summer to gleefully wipe out as many majority-Black congressional districts as they could. Clyburn’s own district, the only one of its kind in his state, was spared only because South Carolina Republicans feared dissolving it would make it easier for Democrats to win the surrounding districts.

Now there is nothing left for even the most milquetoast and diffident liberal to defend from this majority. Gone are the days when liberal law professors at Ivy League schools would write op-eds in major newspapers framing the court or individual rulings as neutral, nonpartisan, or more complicated than it seemed. Legal pundits, having been burned before, gave up on seeking the hidden liberals within the right-wing jurisprudence. Nobody to the left of Mitt Romney is risking their credibility on a runaway right-wing bench. The conservative majority has demolished century-old precedents that made progressive governance possible with unalloyed zeal while also rewriting the Constitution in Donald Trump’s image. Everything is what it looks like now.

The amusing part, were it not so serious, is that the Roberts Court has also botched its relationships on the right. By securing a six-justice conservative majority, legal conservatives and rank-and-file Republicans alike believed that they had essentially secured a win button for American politics. In theory, they can do whatever they want while liberals will have to climb uphill both ways in the snow while carrying 50-pound sandbags on each shoulder just to pry away a single conservative vote, let alone two of them.

Except that hasn’t happened, in large part because there is now a serious ideological mismatch between the court’s conservative justices and American conservatism writ large. Even the justices appointed by Trump are members of the Bush-era generation of legal conservatives, not the Trump-era one. They had to prove their ideological bona fides in right-wing legal circles on issues like abortion and affirmative action, not mass deportations and birthright citizenship.

Indeed, looking at the court’s most recent rulings from the latest term—the first full term of the second Trump administration—as a fervent MAGA acolyte must be infuriating. Roberts voted fourteen years ago to save Barack Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement (the Affordable Care Act) while writing the majority opinion that struck down Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, neutering a core pillar of his economic and foreign policy agenda. Trump himself is largely volcanic towards the court these days, occasionally accusing some of the justices of insufficient personal loyalty for appointing them.

That turn of events is also unsurprising. The president, like every abuser, is angrier about what he can’t do than happier about what he can do. Can he impose his beloved tariffs on anyone for any reason at all? No, says the Supreme Court. Can he fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve’s board of governors? No, says the Supreme Court. Can he send troops into American cities? No, says the Supreme Court. Can he rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause in Stephen Miller’s image? No, no, no, no.

Nor do these bit-by-bit rejections of Trumpism spur any goodwill or reassessment on the left. If anything, they only underscore how far to the right the court has moved. Yes, it’s true that Roberts’ sterling opinion in Trump v. Barbara upheld birthright citizenship. But it also exposed that only two conservative justices (Roberts and Barrett) would endorse the Citizenship Clause’s plain meaning without reservation. The high court’s ruling in Learning Resources v. Trump kneecapped Trump’s plans to levy tariffs without Congress’s assent. It also reaffirmed the long-standing suspicion that the major-questions doctrine exists only to sabotage Democratic presidents when only half of the conservatives would vote to use it against Trump. The president can fire any Senate-confirmed official in the executive branch, frustrating liberals who favor independent regulatory agencies, but can’t seize control of the Fed, enraging a president who probably wishes that he could install a big dial that says INTEREST RATES on the Resolute desk.

The Supreme Court is not an elected branch of government, obviously. The justices enjoy lifetime tenure, so they don’t have to worry about their approval ratings on a day-to-day basis. But they do have to keep an eye on it in the long run. The court’s role in our constitutional order depends on the assent and approval of the legislative and executive branches, which can wipe out much of the court’s power or simply ignore its ruling. Those branches are only kept in check, at least for now, by a deep cultural respect for the American judiciary that is older than the republic itself.

Now, in their ideological zeal, they have sailed into the abyss. The post-Barrett flood of right-wing rulings has completely drained the reservoir of liberal reverence that was filled by the Warren Court in the 1960s, with the Callais ruling squeezing out the last few drops. Trump’s personal vehemence towards a court that won’t give him everything he wants, even when it gives him far more than it should, is also decaying its support on the right.

The result is a Supreme Court that nobody trusts and where everybody loses. Thanks to Trump’s cascading second-term failures, Democrats may get a second chance to expand the court in 2029. If Clyburn’s own changing stance is any indication, the push towards court reform may be irresistible for the party this time. And if it happens, the conservative justices will have no one to blame but themselves.

A corruption scandal involving an 83-year-old religious leader accused of gifting a diamond necklace, two Chanel handbags, and a ginseng root to the president’s wife can seem almost quaint from the other side of the Pacific. But it turns out it comes with some consequence, albeit arguably inconsequential. On Monday, a Korean court handed Han Hak-ja, the leader of the church that most know as “the Moonies,” a two-year sentence for embezzlement of church funds that were used for political bribery. The case has cast a dark shadow over religious influence in Korean politics, and has raised questions about the dwindling church’s continued influence in the Trump administration.

Prosecutors had sought a 13-year sentence, which would have essentially meant life behind bars for the aging leader of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, or FFWPU, formerly known as the Unification Church. The sentence was something of a surprise, as the church had expected the court to agree to the prosecutors’ request. Han was found guilty of political bribery of former first lady Kim Keon Hee and another conservative politician, with the church apologizing for causing “big concerns and disappointment to the people” but vowing to appeal Han’s conviction.

Han, her chief of staff, Won-ju Jeong, and former church deputy Yoon Young-ho were accused of embezzling over $7 million in church funds through false accounting between 2017 and 2025, with investigators seizing a further $26 million in funds hidden in a safe in Han’s bedroom. Han was acquitted of these charges, leading to the greatly reduced sentence. The church has repeatedly sought to place blame on Yoon for the corruption, claiming that Han had been drawn into a case driven by religious persecution. Jeong was given a suspended sentence, while Yoon received an additional six months to the 18 months he received in a separate trial.

Adding to the intrigue, the two women at the center of it all were brought together by Jeon Seong-bae, a court shaman known as Geon Jin, in a web of quid pro quo that saw an exchange of money and political backing, such as inflating membership lists and attending rallies, in order to further the church’s business activities. Geon Jin is a self-proclaimed Buddhist monk who draws on ancient Korean shamanistic practices and specializes in geomancy—the interpretation of markings in the ground as a form of fortune telling. According to prosecutors, Geon Jin approached the first lady and her husband, former conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol, seeking favors for the church’s business empire, given the church’s long-stated goal of achieving “unity of politics and religion”—that is, bringing all world governments under the rule of the church.

Ostensibly an investigation into Korea’s former president and his wife, it instead revealed two women up to their necks in a scandal of their husbands’ making. Thirty-two people in all were indicted over the wider corruption affair, including another controversial sect leader, Lee Man-hee of the Shincheonji Church, which is more infamously known as the epicenter of one of the first outbreaks of Covid outside of China.

The affair came to light after Yoon spectacularly declared martial law in a late-night television address in December 2024, sparking mass protests. He said his “self-coup” was a response to what he claimed was a North Korean conspiracy to overthrow him, but it was widely seen as a bid to save his unpopular presidency from protests, a Congress controlled by the opposition, and mounting corruption scandals, many of them relating to his wife’s perceived hand in government and suggestions that she could be bought. Said to have been conceived over a night of heavy drinking, a related plot reportedly saw Yoon and his defense minister order drones flown into North Korea in a bid to provoke conflict, unbeknownst to the military.

Eleven days later, he was impeached by the country’s national assembly. In January this year, he was sentenced to five years in prison after being found guilty over the decree, and he awaits further trials that could result in the death penalty if he is found guilty of insurrection.

Much of the intrigue surrounding the affair is to do with his wife, Kim Keon Hee, who styled herself as a first lady cosplaying as a Korean Jackie Kennedy–Hillary Clinton type but was viewed as a Lady Macbeth by many Koreans. Twelve years younger than her husband, she took an unprecedented, outsize role as a first lady in Korean politics, even once claiming she was “the man” of her household, shocking a deeply patriarchal society. Her critics were wide-ranging: She made enemies as she helped ban dog meat as food in the country and defended a politician accused of sexual assault. More lurid allegations proliferated in tabloids, which reported that she met her husband when she worked as a nightclub hostess under the name “Julie.” After vigorously denying the claims as fictional sleaze, asserting that she was an academic and a “workaholic,” she was later embarrassed into apologizing for embellishing her résumé and had two of her degrees retracted for plagiarism.

The scope of her role as the hand behind the throne is contested, even by prosecutors. On the night of Yoon’s failed self-coup she was at a plastic surgeon’s office and, they say, screamed at her husband for “ruining everything.” Facing three separate criminal trials, she has so far been sentenced to a total of 11 years in prison.

In a similar vein, Han Hak-ja’s notoriety, and criminality, stems from her role as wife of a man of immense power and influence. Han, who was detained in September last year, was helped from a car into her wheelchair and into a Seoul courtroom, eyes closed against the barrage of flashing cameras and the cries from supporters of “I love you, Mother Han.” She is the wife and successor of the late Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church.

Moon famously declared himself the Messiah, blending Christianity with Eastern spirituality, placing Moon and his family at the center of God’s third attempt to perfect humans after the failure of Adam and Jesus before him. In this interpretation, God’s will also means accumulating exceptional wealth and power, which for decades saw Moon play an outsize role in politics in the United States, Korea, Japan, and several South American countries. The church is infamous for its mass weddings, sexual rituals, and exploitation of members’ labor and donations, particularly in Japan, as well as for its political activities and its multinational business empire, which involves everything from sushi ingredients to military arms.

Moon married Han, his second wife, when he was 40 and she was just 17, and she bore him 14 children. After Moon’s death in 2012, she became the bitterly contested heir to his empire, battling several of her children for control of the church and its considerable business holdings. Today, Moon’s legacy continues to haunt all three nations where its political imprint is greatest.

Throughout Moon’s life, the church was most popular in Japan, where it exploited postwar guilt to trick the bereaved into donating huge sums, which it used for political influence and to build a multinational business empire. The full nature of that relationship was brought to light in 2022, when former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated by Tetsuya Yamagami, whose mother had given away the family fortune to the church, a substantial backer of Abe’s party. Earlier this year, the church was stripped of its religious status in Japan, losing its tax exemption and forcing the liquidation of its assets—although some members are already moving behind the scenes to reestablish the church under a different name.

In a twist of fate, just as Yamagami’s trial was taking place last October, so too was Han’s. Knowing she was likely to be convicted, Han made public appeals for leniency that went well beyond potential well-wishers in Seoul. The church has embarked on a campaign to convince the Trump administration to intervene on the grounds of Christian persecution, a cause it has frequently embraced around the world. Unlike many other petitioners, Han’s pleas rest on more than her faith. They bring into focus the church’s 50-year ties to the Republican Party and the fact that many senior figures in the Trump court—including the president himself—have been lavished with the church’s largesse in recent years for appearances at its conferences.

Moon’s fervent anti-communism and seemingly endless pots of money helped the church gain substantial influence during the Cold War across Korea, Japan, Latin America, and the United States. The Moonies came to prominence in the United States in the 1970s through their support for Nixon during the depths of Watergate; they maintained their allegiance to the Republican Party throughout a rolling series of scandals that reflected poorly on, but benefited, all involved. They were mired in a corruption scandal of their own, known as Koreagate, in the 1970s, which exposed ties to Korean intelligence and to both political parties in Washington, and which faded from collective memory thanks to its complexity and its embarrassment to both sides of the aisle.

The church publishes The Washington Times, a precursor to Fox News during its heyday in the Reagan administration, when the president proclaimed it the first thing he read each day. Despite being imprisoned for 13 months in 1984 for tax evasion, Moon’s influence extended into the George H.W. Bush administration; after leaving office, Bush and his wife toured the world with Moon and Han, preaching peace, love, family values, and robust American capitalism—lending their reputation to the rehabilitation of the wildly unpopular church leader, netting millions in the process with speaking fees of $80,000 a pop.

Trump gave three speeches for the church’s front group, the Universal Peace Federation, between 2021 and 2022, for which he was paid $2.5 million—including one appearance that took place just 17 days after Abe’s assassination. At a church conference in 2021, Trump appeared in a prerecorded message to praise Han as a “tremendous person” who had done “incredible work on behalf of peace all over the world.” Last year, Trump denounced the “vicious raids on churches” involved in the scandal, while the conservative media star Charlie Kirk visited the country shortly before his death and spoke out about the perceived persecution of Christians.

Newt Gingrich remains the star columnist at The Washington Times and posts frequently on X about the case. Paula White Cain, the senior adviser to the Trump White House’s Faith Office, continues to attend church conferences where she calls Han “Holy Mother Han,” the title used by her followers, and has acted as an intermediary between Trump and the current Korean administration.

Two of Han’s estranged sons, Sean and Justin, were present at the January 6 insurrection and are Mar-a-Lago regulars. They run the offshoot Sanctuary Church. Based in Pennsylvania, the church is also known as Rod of Iron Ministries, infamous for worshippers clutching semiautomatic rifles—and for Sean wearing a crown of bullet casings on his head. The two brothers host MAGA events that have been attended by figures including Michael Flynn and Donald Trump Jr.

Trump’s recent re-embrace of Kim Jong Un hasn’t helped matters for any side. The current administration in Seoul feels ever more isolated from its greatest ally, and Korea’s powerful conservative Christian right is dismayed that the president is embracing its great foe and the longtime source of its strong military alliance with Washington. Last week, Trump further inflamed tensions with a Truth Social post attacking South Korea for refusing to join his war against Iran, noting that he has “a very good relationship” with Kim Jong Un.

For the church, however, their position is clear: Their multibillionaire leader should continue to enjoy her lifestyle on the backs of church members’ work and donations. In a statement, the president of the American church, Demian Dunkley, said that “the Mother of Peace should be free to travel the world.” Following her arrest last September, her estranged son Sean, who has called her the “Whore of Babylon,” said in a statement that “this is only the beginning of the Judgment.”

For many church critics, Han’s conviction has the air of Al Capone to it: She’s been nailed for relatively minor charges, while long-standing allegations about embezzlement of church funds and exploitation of members’ labor continue to go unexamined by courts under the guise of religious freedom. So far, Han’s allies in Washington have remained conspicuously quiet—but given their long-standing financial arrangements, that’s unlikely to last long.

On June 11, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin seemed close to tears as he described what the Trump administration has deemed the mass trafficking and abuse of children. Under the Biden administration, Mullin asserted that “absolute horrific things” occurred. “Some of these kids claim that they were raped six to seven hundred times,” he said. “We’re going to rescue as many kids as we can possibly find.... As a father of six with three young girls, I will do whatever I have to do.”

Mullin was not referring to the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, but rather to a widespread conspiracy-driven theory about hundreds of thousands of “unaccompanied alien children,” or UACs, who entered the United States during the Biden administration and are falsely described by the Trump administration as missing and potentially trafficked.

Now under intensified pressure to increase deportations and with a seemingly unlimited budget, DHS is using its $150 billion windfall to incentivize local law enforcement to assist in confirming the locations of UACs across the country via the 287(g) program, which deputizes police, sheriffs, and some constables to act as immigration agents. According to documents from DHS, these financial incentives can add up to tens of thousands of dollars for each UAC found and verified.

Immigrant children are facing multiple attacks by the Trump administration, including decimation of legal services and ramped-up detention. Added to that mix, local police are getting in on the action under the guise of protecting children and fighting human trafficking. As part of the overall web of silent mass deportations, the supposed search for UACs blends QAnon-style conspiracy theories with an overfunded and supercharged deportation machine that has been targeting immigrant children and families without regard to the human rights consequences.

“Sending armed agents to the homes of immigrant children is not a safety check. It is a serious threat of enforcement,” Mary Miller Flowers, the director of legislative affairs at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, explained. The results are likely to be nothing short of disastrous for everyone involved.

When young people enter the country seeking asylum without their parents, they are generally released to a sponsor, often a family member already living in America. Unlike adults, children are processed by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR, which is under the auspices of Department of Health and Human Services, not DHS. According to a 1997 consent decree and the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, child immigrants are entitled to certain rights and protections, including safe and sanitary conditions as well as prompt release from detention. Unlike DHS, a law enforcement agency, ORR was intentionally kept separate. Jen Smyers, the deputy director of ORR during the Biden administration, explained that ORR was intended to be about child welfare—not immigration enforcement.

After ORR places immigrant children with their sponsors, most UACs receive a court date for their pending immigration case. These youth are supposed to keep their addresses current in order to follow up on their applications for asylum and immigration court dates, but not all of them do. Under the Biden administration, large numbers of UACs entered the country, largely as a result of changes to draconian immigration policies imposed by the first Trump administration. Detention facilities for these children filled to capacity, presenting dangers to young people’s health and safety. As required, the Biden administration released children to sponsors living in the United States.  

Republicans have claimed, with little evidence, that UACs were being placed with unvetted or unfit sponsors, arguing that this amounted to “human trafficking.” These rumors gained popularity as anti-immigration groups used alleged “human trafficking” as a reason to limit migration. As soon as Trump came into office for the second time, his administration claimed that nearly 450,000 UACs were potential victims of trafficking and that some 300,000 were considered “missing.” Immigration experts agree that this number is an utter invention—most UACs live with their sponsors, and some are now adults.

Nevertheless, Trump’s DHS has prioritized locating these young people alongside other policies that have ramped up mass deportations, including by requiring ORR to turn over all the information it has to DHS for law enforcement purposes. According to a memo Immigration and Customs Enforcement released just days after Trump’s inauguration, DHS would “commence an operational initiative” to locate UACs who entered the country during the Biden administration. This included ensuring “UAC’s immigration obligations are met” as well as “investigative activities to ensure UAC are not subjected to crimes of human trafficking or other exploitation.”

The initial phases of the initiative, according to the memo, were focused on locating UACs who were threats to public safety or flight risks, including young people who had run away from shelters. Later stages of the program appear intended to locate UACs and charge their sponsors with potential crimes—such as trafficking, violations of the Mann Act, or making false statements. Other publications have reported that ICE has hired private companies to locate immigrants, including UACs. DHS agents have also been engaged in these “wellness checks,” including in at least two Los Angeles elementary schools. It is not clear exactly what is happening to the children the agencies do find, but in most cases, they are still in deportation proceedings.

In November 2025, DHS announced that 287(g) agencies would also have the option to participate in locating UACs, beginning in Florida, an example of the mission creep for 287(g). The memo reads, “The primary focus of this initiative is to conduct welfare checks on these children to ensure that they are safe and not being exploited.” Information about these UACs was sent to law enforcement, and the 287(g) partners are expected to return “an electronic form” to an email address, UAC287g@ice.dhs.

Mullin and DHS have made “locating” these children a priority, transferring reams of information about UACs and their sponsors from ORR to DHS, as Reuters just reported. Attorney General Todd Blanche has instructed prosecutors to prioritize charges against UAC sponsors as part of this program. In reality, this so-called “verification initiative” has led to more arrests, mostly of adult sponsors. “They are trying to lay the predicate to do more removals,” Scott Shuchart, an immigration attorney and a former DHS official, explained. ICE, he said, was “spending like a moron with lottery money.”

Since Trump took office in January 2025, 287(g) agreements have exploded. Most of the agreements are “task force” agreements, a program that allows local law enforcement to act like roving immigration agents with the same powers to question, arrest, and detain. Thanks to DHS’s supersized budget, 287(g) task force agencies are eligible for compensation, including reimbursement for officer time and stipends for vehicles and other equipment.

There is no real way to track which 287(g) partners are also locating UACs as part of DHS’s program, because DHS has largely forbidden them from disclosing specifics. (The Young Center filed a lawsuit this week for records on the UAC verification initiative.)

The information we do have suggests that agencies are being paid (or at least seeking payment) for each UAC verified. A reporter from the Chattanooga Times Free Press found through public records that an elected constable in southeastern Tennessee was assisting with locating UACs in other states. He had already received $107,500 for a vehicle and equipment, and he billed DHS for additional time. A document from the constable explains a payment structure that resembles a bounty—agencies are paid up to $2,500 for confirming the address of UAC as well as up to $20,000 for “verify[ing] the child’s safety and living conditions,” as well as school enrollment status.

The mission is presented in the documents thus: “The UAC Safety Verification Initiative builds a unified framework among law enforcement partners to ensure every unaccompanied child is safe, accounted for, and protected from harm. It’s about coordination, accountability, and shared duty—every officer, every agency, working together for every child.”

Information about agencies participating in UAC verification has been difficult to find. The impact of this “safety verification initiative” has been done with little notification or alert.

On the few occasions that members of the public obtain information, officials have reacted fairly quickly. In Ohio, for example, a police chief from the township of Gratis went to a Cincinnati public school in an attempt to verify the location of some children there, according to school officials. Not only did the school principal deny access, but the officer was placed on administrative leave.

In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the local district attorney Heather Adams signed a 287(g) agreement with ICE in September 2025 and trained one detective through a 40-hour online course for the “task force” 287(g) program. Adams told the public, “No one in our office is conducting immigration ‘sweeps’ or stopping cars as a part of our 287(g) agreement to assist in immigration enforcement.”

It was not until March of this year that community members learned that this 287(g) task force agreement included a provision that allowed the trained detective to assist with the Unaccompanied Alien Children Safety Verification Initiative. (Trex Profitt, a member of Indivisible Lancaster, said that he thought the disclosure was an inadvertent slipup by Adams.) Adams issued a press release claiming the detective’s involvement was “minimal.”

With 287(g) programs reaching historic heights—according to one researcher, there are now over 2,000 agencies with at least one agreement around the country—more local law enforcement agencies may become involved in locating immigrant children, often without clear guidelines or public notification. Plus, since it is back-to-school season, advocates told me that many people are concerned about the safety of sending children to school. “Giving the task of ‘child wellness checks’ to local law enforcement only exacerbates the widespread fear and distrust that immigrant families and communities experience when they consistently see local law enforcement engaged in immigration arrests and enforcement,” Nithya Nathan-Pineau, policy attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, said.

The greatest risk, according to advocates, is the arrest of adult sponsors and other family members. Once a child’s sponsor is arrested, that child returns to the custody of ORR and is still placed in deportation proceedings, according to Smyers. Under Trump, the ORR has added additional hurdles before it places kids with a sponsor, including complete background checks, which has led to children spending more time in ORR custody and has further separated parents from their children.

Combined with the ongoing crisis over the lack of lawyers for young immigrants and hurried mass deportation hearings, children face an unprecedented risk of deportation. The Trump administration recently gave a no-bid contract to OUR Rescue, an “anti-trafficking” nonprofit formerly known as “Operation Underground Railroad,” to represent immigrant children in court. The founder of OUR Rescue, Tim Ballard, was ousted over accusations of sexual assault and trafficking.

It’s plain that DHS’s main concern is not human trafficking; instead, it appears to be using a manhunt for UACs, under the guise of protecting children, as yet another way to locate immigrants to deport. None of this keeps children safe, Flowers emphasizes: “We know what keeps kids safe: being with family who loves them, living in a home and not a detention facility, and having a lawyer who represents them.”

At dawn on June 20, 1954, Border Patrol agents erected roadblocks across the Southwest, and reporters rode alongside as officers looked for anyone of “Mexican appearance.” They descended on farms, ranches, warehouses, and neighborhoods, stopping people on highways and pulling workers out of fields. Trucks and buses carried Mexican migrants to detention centers. Trains and airplanes carried them farther away. Some were handed over to Mexican authorities and transported hundreds of miles into the interior, a deliberate attempt to make returning to the United States more difficult.

Others were put aboard commercial ships that normally carried bananas from Mexico to Texas. On their return voyages, the ships carried deportees south. The head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, a retired general named Joseph Swing, liked the arrangement because “I understand they get a little sea sick and they are a long way from home.” A congressional investigation eventually condemned the vessels as “penal hellships.”

The government called it “Operation Wetback.” Even the plainly racist name was deliberately publicized by President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration. Officials wanted Mexicans to believe agents could appear anywhere and that they had better leave the country before they were caught. The Eisenhower administration later claimed that more than a million people had been expelled, but the real number was probably far smaller.

Donald Trump has long understood the political power of Operation Wetback, and has repeatedly praised Eisenhower’s crackdown as proof that mass deportation could be done. “Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president, people liked him,” Trump said in a 2015 Republican debate. Eisenhower had “moved a million and a half illegal immigrants out of this country,” he claimed. “They never came back.”

The history was considerably messier than Trump suggested. The purpose of Operation Wetback was not solely to deport migrants. Its other aim was to encourage American employers to change the way they hired workers by forcing them to instead use the tightly controlled Bracero Program, which admitted Mexican men temporarily and tied their ability to return for work to the approval of employers. The government terrorized Mexicans into a coercive labor regime designed to make them cheaper and more controllable. Trump drew a simpler lesson: The government had once mobilized enormous power against immigrants, and he could do so again.

This June, federal agents arrested more than 43,000 people, the highest monthly total since Trump returned to office. By July, ICE was holding more than 65,000 people in detention, and the administration claimed it had deported more than 590,000 people since January 2025. Unlike the border surges of earlier years, much of this enforcement has been taking place inside the country, through arrests at workplaces, homes, traffic stops, court appearances, and required check-ins.

It is tempting to see this enormous crackdown as a distortion of immigration enforcement, a system bent to authoritarian purposes by a president unusually willing to test its limits. UCLA historian Kelly Lytle Hernández’s new book, Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control, offers a more disturbing explanation: Trump did not have to build this apparatus. America built it for him. The reason a president can exercise powers over a group of people that would be constitutionally shocking in almost any other setting, Hernández argues, is that over the course of several decades, American immigration law was deliberately constructed as an exception to ordinary constitutional protections. Trump inherited a machine assembled over two centuries by slaveholders, eugenicists, and segregationists.

Hernández’s first book, Migra! (2010), told the history of the U.S. Border Patrol, and ever since she has been a major figure in a field that has refuted the sentimental story of the United States as a nation made by welcoming newcomers. Mae Ngai’s Impossible Subjects (2004) showed how federal law produced the modern category of the “illegal alien.” Erika Lee’s America for Americans (2019) traced xenophobia across American history. Jia Lynn Yang’s One Mighty and Irresistible Tide (2020) recovered the political struggle that led from the national-origins quotas of 1924 to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine (2020) showed that expulsion has been a central, durable practice of the American state. And Michael Luo’s Strangers in the Land (2025) returned readers to Chinese exclusion—the racial crucible in which modern federal immigration power was formed. Building on this scholarship, Hernández takes the history further back: Before Chinese exclusion, the Border Patrol, or national-origins quotas, she finds enslavers using migration control to protect slavery itself.

Beginning in 1791, enslaved people in Saint-Domingue rose against French colonial rule and created Haiti, terrifying American slaveholders with proof that Black liberation could succeed. Southern states tried to bar free Black people, and Congress reinforced their restrictions. The Immigration Act of 1803 prohibited free Black people arriving in the country from entering states that barred their presence. America’s first federal immigration ban, Hernández emphasizes, was not designed to police a modern national border. It was to ensure the enslavement of Black people.

The federal government acquired another extraordinary instrument in 1798, amid fears of war with France. The Alien Friends Act allowed the president to expel foreigners considered dangerous, but it soon expired after becoming notorious. The Alien Enemies Act survived, allowing the president to detain and remove nationals of a hostile foreign power. For most of American history it remained a wartime power.

The more consequential transformation came when Congress began restricting the entry of Chinese laborers in 1882 and continued tightening those restrictions for years. The Supreme Court then offered something even more powerful than exclusion: constitutional exceptionalism. In a series of decisions involving Chinese Americans, the court developed what became known as the “plenary power doctrine.” Immigration, it held, belonged to the federal government’s sovereign authority, and the political branches deserved exceptionally broad discretion over it. In Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889), the court upheld the exclusion of a longtime Chinese resident whose return certificate Congress invalidated while he traveled, and described the power to exclude foreigners as an inherent attribute of national sovereignty.

In Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893), the court extended that logic, from keeping people out to expelling those already here. Deportation, the majority reasoned, was an administrative procedure rather than criminal punishment. In a dissent, Justice Stephen Field, who had helped establish broad federal authority in Chae Chan Ping, recoiled from where the Fong Yue Ting decision led: The majority had placed a “dangerous and despotic power” in the government, an apt epigraph for the present.

In Wong Wing v. United States (1896), the court granted jury trials to immigrants facing criminal punishment but called detention pending deportation “not imprisonment in a legal sense.” The state could apprehend rather than arrest, detain rather than imprison, and deport rather than punish. Such semantic engineering moved familiar acts into a civil category with fewer protections. Decided the same day the court sanctioned segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, Wong Wing helped complete an immigration regime that was also organized along racial lines. While Plessy was later repudiated, the immigration precedents survived.

The state could apprehend rather than arrest, detain rather than imprison, and deport rather than punish. Such semantic engineering moved familiar acts into a civil category with fewer protections.

The exceptional power described by Justice Field soon merged with a new racial science. In the early twentieth century, eugenicists argued that nations could improve themselves by controlling reproduction and migration. Border restriction became a form of racial engineering. Harry Laughlin, one of the most influential American eugenicists and an adviser to Congress, described immigration control as a tool for preserving the nation’s racial composition. The Immigration Act of 1924 translated those ideas into national policy. Its national-origins quotas overwhelmingly favored Northern and Western Europeans, while Asians were largely barred. The same year, Congress created the Border Patrol, and soon granted its officers warrantless arrest and search authority. Agents focused that authority on Mexicans and frequently swept in Mexican American citizens, as well.

In 1929, Congress made unauthorized entry a federal crime. One of the leading forces behind the law was South Carolina Senator Coleman Livingston Blease, a white supremacist who said of Mexicans, “I want them kept out.” The descendants of that law survive as Sections 1325 and 1326 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, criminalizing improper entry and illegal reentry. Prosecutions became so common that the government had to expand prison capacity near the border. By 2011, illegal reentry had become the most frequently prosecuted federal crime.

Whites, on the other hand, encountered a different arm of the state. Hernández shows that the Border Patrol devoted far less time policing the Canadian border and tracking European migrants. The Registry Act of 1929 allowed immigrants who had entered before 1921 to pay a fee and become permanent residents, while a companion program let migrants cross into Canada and reenter legally, a route geographically closed to Mexicans. By 1940, Canadians and Europeans made up 80 percent of the immigrants who had legalized themselves under the law.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished national-origins quotas, prohibited racial discrimination in visa allocation, and transformed the country by allowing millions from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere to enter legally. But Congress removed explicit racial categories without dismantling much of the machine. Plenary power, deportation, criminal penalties for unlawful entry and reentry, the Border Patrol, and officers’ expansive authority all remained.

Later presidents and Congresses added powers. Bipartisan laws enacted in 1988, 1994, and especially 1996 expanded detention and the crimes triggering deportation, deputized local police, and enabled removal without ordinary hearings. George W. Bush put enforcement in the new Department of Homeland Security; Barack Obama oversaw enormous numbers of removals while protecting some undocumented immigrants. Hernández’s argument reaches beyond another indictment of Trump’s racism: His terror campaign depends on powers built and preserved by governments that would have rejected his rhetoric.

Trump has exploited those powers more eagerly than most predecessors. In March 2025, he revived the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to send Venezuelan men accused of belonging to Tren de Aragua to a notorious El Salvador prison. (No matter that many of those deported had been wrongly identified as gang members on the flimsiest suspicion.) The president called the gang’s presence an “invasion” and “predatory incursion,” converting a problem of crime and migration into an act of war. The wartime logic has a history: The Supreme Court used remarkably similar ideas during Chinese exclusion, treating the arrival of a racially alien population as a threat against which the nation could defend itself. Trump is speaking a language the U.S. immigration system already understands.

A government that can designate immigrants as enemies, arrest and deport them, and imprison them beyond the reach of courts could turn on people like me. I am an immigrant. I have lived in the United States for decades, built my life here, and remain a lawful permanent resident, a green card holder. For most of my adult life, that distinction from citizenship seemed important but settled. I was here legally; I belonged. The political division between “legal” and “illegal” appeared to put me safely on one side of a bright line. Recently, that line has become less reassuring.

In June, the Supreme Court decided Blanche v. Lau, involving a lawful permanent resident. The Court ruled 6–3 that border officers need not have clear and convincing evidence of a qualifying crime before treating a returning green card holder as seeking admission. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned that the decision gave the government a “massive blank check” and could leave permanent residents in years of uncertainty. Even the most secure noncitizen status remains governed by a regime with rules of its own.

I do not expect agents at my door tomorrow. My fear comes from discovering how much of Trump’s desired power already exists and has been normalized against people with fewer political rights. That fear is smaller than the danger facing undocumented migrants, asylum-seekers, and those already deported, some to countries where they may never be free again. But that is Hernández’s point: Immigration law trains Americans to imagine concentric circles of belonging, each with different constitutional claims. The person at the border has fewer rights than the person inside; the undocumented immigrant fewer than the green card holder; the green card holder fewer than the citizen. Each group is reassured that the machine is meant for someone further outside. Trump depends on that reassurance. We cannot simply move a fortunate few into a safer category while preserving arbitrary power over everyone below it.

Trump’s responsibility for the cruelty of his immigration program is direct, but treating that cruelty as his invention lets his predecessors off too easily.

A country can regulate its borders without preserving powers created for racial exclusion or treating immigration as a constitutional exception. It can distinguish citizens from noncitizens without exposing the latter to government powers that would horrify Americans if applied generally. Trump’s terror program demands a larger reckoning than whether this president has gone too far. We cannot merely wait for a different president to operate the same machine more humanely.

Congress should reconsider criminal provisions born in the Blease era. Chinese exclusion precedents should no longer provide a constitutional foundation for sweeping immigration power. The courts should reject the proposition that by calling migrants invaders, a president can seize powers created for war (an issue that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently sidestepped). Most importantly, the court should bring the immigration system back under ordinary constitutional discipline: with meaningful hearings, access to counsel, genuine judicial review, limits on detention and warrantless policing, and laws stripped not only of racist language but of racist design.

Trump’s responsibility for the cruelty of his immigration program is direct, but treating that cruelty as his invention lets his predecessors off too easily. Trump will eventually leave office, but simply defeating his abuse is no longer enough. America has to decide whether any president should possess these powers at all.

Over the next two months, James Talarico and Abdul El-Sayed will face tens millions of dollars in negative ads savaging them, Fox News and a broader right-wing media ecosystem portraying them in the worst way possible, Republican opponents questioning their manhood (Talarico) and patriotism (El-Sayed), and a president eager to attack them. They shouldn’t also have to deal with fellow Democrats taking potshots at them too. So I urge Jasmine Crockett, Josh Gottheimer, Dana Nessel, and other prominent Democrats to stop bashing their party’s Senate hopefuls and instead start slamming El-Sayed and Talarico’s opponents. 

I can’t believe I have to write this! I know there’s a perpetual war over the soul of the Democratic Party. But it can, and must, be paused until November 3. 

Let’s start with Texas and Crockett. Talarico defeated Crockett 52-46 percent in a tense March primary. The congresswoman has a legitimate beef that she and other Black female Democratic candidates are treated unfairly by a party that is obsessed with “electability” and often views the most viable candidates as those who are white and male like Talarico. A party both committed to racial and gender inclusion and heavily reliant on getting more than 90 percent of Black women’s votes to win elections should be trying to get more Black women into office, not essentially practicing pre-discrimination. “We will oppose you based on your race and/or gender in the primary because we fear voters in the general election will reject you based on your race and/or gender,” is the position of many Democratic voters and elites towards Black and female candidates. They need to abandon that. Talarico’s race and gender alone may have been what put him over the top in the primary, which I suspect grinds at Crockett. (It’s worth noting that some voters may have felt that even a white male candidate couldn’t win in Texas if they are as partisan as Crockett.) 

That said, Talarico would be a much better senator than Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican candidate. So Crockett should be trying hard to ensure that Talarico wins. She’s not. “I personally don’t feel like the excitement necessarily exists within the Black community. Right now, I don’t feel like they’re excited,” Crockett said on the “Front Page” podcast recently of Talarico’s candidacy. That might sound like Crockett just giving a political analysis. And it’s likely that Talarico (like most candidates) has work to do to improve his standing among Black voters. 

But Crockett has suggested several times over the last few months that Talarico is running a lackluster campaign, particularly with regard to appealing to Black voters. She could air those critiques in private. Or she could campaign aggressively for Talarico to Black voters, to address this shortage of excitement that she is asserting. She’s doing neither. She refused to speak at the Texas Democrats’ convention in June, even after Talarico reportedly personally called and asked the congresswoman to give the keynote address. She has suggested that she will campaign for other Democratic candidates in Texas but not Talarico. 

Crockett is acting like a sore loser. That’s not unusual in politics. But Crockett shouldn’t be taking this approach now. This November is perhaps the best chance in decades that Democrats have had to win a Senate seat in Texas. Winning that seat could help flip the Senate and put a key check on an authoritarian president. Talarico needs all of the support he can muster, particularly from Black voters who might be influenced by Crockett. (Polls suggest Black voters overwhelmingly chose Crockett over Talarico during the primary.)

So if the congresswoman can’t bring herself to enthusiastically campaign for Talarico, she could at least stop implying that Talarico can’t connect with Black people, the kinds of remarks that get lots of media coverage and will make it harder for him to … connect with Black people. Talarico is actually trying quite hard to connect with Black Texans, fully aware many of them were disappointed that Crocket lost in the primary. 

In Michigan, Representative Haley Stevens, who lost to El-Sayed, fully embraced him right after the primary. But Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel and Representative Hillary Scholten have refused to endorse him. Outside of the state, a number of Democrats continue to attack El-Sayed, most notably Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey in an appearance on Fox News and an op-ed in The Free Press. And numerous other Democrats and MSNBC hosts continue to link El-Sayed to podcaster Hasan Piker. 

The main fissure here is over Israel policy. Piker and El Sayed have cast Israel’s military actions in Gaza over the last several years as a genocide, called for the U.S. to stop providing military aid to Israel, and questioned if Israel should remain as a state where Jewish people control the government. Nessel, Scholten, Gottheimer, and many other Democrats are less critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza and want Israel to remain a Jewish state. Some pro-Israel Democrats say that many of Piker’s remarks and a few of El-Sayed’s have veered into either antisemitism or at least intolerance of Jewish Americans.

The other tension is over which factions in the party have power. El-Sayed’s victory over Stevens was a big win for the party’s progressives over the Democrats’ center-left bloc.  And if El-Sayed wins the general election, progressives will seize on that win to argue that Democrats can ignore the center-left’s usual electability arguments against the left and nominate someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2028. So some in the center-left are sore about their primary defeats. 

Democrats shouldn’t always automatically fall in line with the party’s nominee. I would be wary of backing a Democratic candidate who opposed abortion rights or raising the minimum wage. I understood Democrats who felt that they could not support Kamala Harris in 2024 because she embraced the Biden’s administration’s policies in Gaza. If Gottheimer or Nessel feel strongly that the U.S. should keep offering military aid to Israel or that Israel must remain a Jewish state and that they can’t support anyone who doesn’t hold those views, I would respect that stance. Those are serious and legitimate policy differences. 

But other rationales for not fully backing El-Sayed are unacceptable. Considering how important this Senate race is, no Democratic official should oppose El-Sayed based on lingering resentment from this year’s primary or because of this race’s implications for 2028. 

The obsession with Piker is also misguided. If Piker says something that El-Sayed disagrees with, the candidate should state his disagreement (and he has). But the idea that Piker is some Hitler-like villain that El-Sayed must completely disavow as a person is crazy. Piker is not running for office in Michigan; his statements and policy views aren’t at issue in this race. This is an attempt by center-left Democrats to punish Piker for boosting El-Sayed and other progressive candidates during primaries and to silence a prominent left-wing voice in the party. I would be opposed to such a shaming campaign anyway, but particularly now. Why are Democrats spending time talking about a lefty podcaster who isn’t influencing their candidate much when they could talk about an autocrat president who is very much influencing the Republican candidate (Mike Rodgers)? 

Finally, the vague, floating, and hard-to-dispel antisemitism accusation being lodged at El-Sayed (and Zohran Mamdani last year) should be dropped. If there are specific comments or policies that pro-Israel and/or Jewish Democrats want El-Sayed to address, that’s legitimate. El-Sayed rightly apologized this weekend for a remark that he made in March, in which he said “hurt people hurt people” when discussing an attack on a synagogue in the Detroit suburbs. 

But much of this criticism is falsely implying that a strong critic of the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians has malice toward American Jews. 

What connects the Michigan and Texas cases is the kind of racial and identity politics that Democrats desperately need to move on from. There are legitimate questions about the role of Black women in Democratic politics and what the party’s stances on Israel-Palestine issues should be. But the way to debate those questions isn’t to lodge vague accusations that Talarico can’t connect with Black people or that El-Sayed hates Jewish ones and use those as wedge issues to tank the party’s Senate candidates. I welcome an extended conversation about the role of Black women in the party and its Middle East policies in November—and I would assume Talarico and El-Sayed would as well. 

Let me close with my own accusation. It’s fairly obvious that suggesting that a white candidate doesn’t connect with Black voters or that a Muslim candidate is antisemitic might hurt those candidates in a general election. I worry that Crockett doesn’t actually want Talarico to win; same for Gottheimer, Scholten, and Nessel in El-Sayed’s case. They would prefer a pro-Trump senator to one from a rival faction of their own party. That’s a strong accusation, but it’s pretty in line with their recent behavior. These politicians have two months to prove me wrong. I hope they do.