Political News

ABC isn’t rolling over after the Federal Communications Commission demanded the network to upend decades of precedent and hand out airtime to the right. The FCC, led by censorious Trump appointee Brendan Carr, requested that Texas-based KTRK-TV—which is owned by ABC and parent company Disney—submit to its demand that programming like “The View” be forced to meet “equal time” requirements.

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A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. The race to replace Pelosi: A conversation with Scott Wiener Check out Daily Kos’ exclusive interview. Trump’s dumb tariffs get spiked in court—again That’s a whole lot of “winning” … Want the Epstein files? Here are some about UFOs. The truth is alien to the…

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A cartoon by Brian McFadden. Support my Patreon for early access and exclusives.Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, or at my website. Related | The Supreme Court’s attack on voting rights is already causing chaos…

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“Alligator Alcatraz”? More like Alligator Albatross. Remember when Alligator Alcatraz, Florida’s massive immigrant detention center, opened? It was just last summer, and President Donald Trump toured the facility. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt gushed over how great it was that it was “isolated and surrounded by dangerous wildlife.” Then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi…

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President Donald Trump gave opening remarks at a Mother’s Day event in the Rose Garden Friday, honoring mothers who’ve lost children in combat or to crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. Of course, Trump couldn’t help but blather about how he redesigned the Rose Garden. “The problem with it is you couldn’t walk on it because this is built on a wetland, and the grass was always…

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35-year-old Benjamin Moore has lived in Mountain Meadows Mobile Home Park, outside Bozeman, Montana, since he was 17. This month, for the first time, he’s withholding his rent.

On May 1, Moore received a rent bill for $947, up 11 percent from the month before, and the second hike in nine months—the product of the park’s sale to an undisclosed buyer. 

Moore hung a sign on his trailer that says “RENT STRIKE.” He and his neighbors in Mountain Meadows and nearby King Arthur Park, organized with the citywide group Bozeman Tenants United, are collectively withholding over $50,000 a month from their landlord. 

Historically, trailer parks have been a relatively affordable housing option—a third of trailer park residents in America live below the poverty line. But on average, their cost of living has risen 45 percent over the past decade. By unionizing, the Bozeman trailer park tenants believe they might be able to fight the most recent rent hike—especially given the state of their housing. 

For years, tenants say, the maintenance hasn’t been attended to: tree limbs hang perilously over trailers, and water shutoffs are a regular occurrence. “I cannot recall a time in the past 20 years where we had three straight months of water and power working all day, every day,” Moore said. 

Shauna Thompson, another resident, calls the water “atrocious…like a Milky Way, like you’re drinking skim milk. It’s very nasty and turned off all the time, without any notice.” And tenants allege that they’ve experienced retribution for maintenance requests, punitive eviction attempts, and unsafe conditions. 

Members of Bozeman Tenants United, including Benjamin Moore and Shauna Thompson, rip up their rent increase notices. Jered McCafferty

“It’s really hard on people here,” Moore said. Some residents are “already paying their entire Social Security check for rent. It’s a very poor neighborhood. We’ve got old folks. We’ve got young families. We’ve got working-class people who can’t afford anything else.”

For the past four decades, a group called Oakland Properties has owned both trailer parks. When they learned about the sale, tenants were scared that their parks would be bulldozed, or that their rent would be increased even further, forcing them to move. 

The tenants attempted to buy the parks themselves, but were decisively outbid. The winning bidder demanded an NDA. The transaction should be finalized next month, park owner Gary Oakland said, but residents still don’t know who’s going to own the land they live on.

This month’s rent hike, Oakland acknowledged, was “part and parcel” of the sale. But for tenants, it’s a catastrophe. On top of the $947 lot rent—more than double the national average—many residents also pay off home loans on their trailers, as well as insurance and utilities costs.

Oakland calls claims of broken utilities “nonsense”: “If it was such a bad place to live, why would the homes be selling for such high dollars?” he said. The rent strike, Oakland points out, is “just a group of people not paying their rent.”

Some people are rationing their medication to make ends meet, Moore said. “There’s one person who canceled Life Alert. It’s either Life Alert or rent, and if you don’t pay rent, they evict you and throw you in the streets.” 

Many of the tenants of King Arthur and Mountain Meadows parks rely on a fixed income to pay their rent.Jered McCafferty

Tenant organizers across the nation have found a foothold in recent years organizing against individual landlords, and Bozeman’s tenant union, situated in one of the fastest-growing communities in the state, is no exception. Tenant unions from Los Angeles to Kansas City to New York have organized to win rent freezes, maintenance, and security in their homes.

Mobile home parks—increasingly private-equity-owned and uniquely at-risk in the face of climate disasters—are organizing, too: a group of trailer park residents in Columbia, Missouri, unionized in February. In Montana, as Rebecca Burns recently wrote for In These Times, mobile homes were already once a site of tenant organizing: buoyed by the state’s miners unions, the first Bozeman-area mobile home tenants’ union won an agreement with their landlord in 1978.  

Oakland says park residents “have been terrorized by the union,” and plans to evict the strikers. The strikers say they’ve retained a lawyer and will fight to stay in their homes.

“I wish none of this was happening,” Moore said. “Your utilities should work. Your place should be safe. You should be able to get in and out of it. These are the absolute basics, and they just haven’t kept them up. And if you call them on it, they threaten you.”

Last year, I wrote a viral Bluesky thread about Paulina Borsook, who published a scathing and prescient takedown of Silicon Valley’s sociopathic politics back in 2000.

That thread led to a New York Times profile of Borsook and, within a few months, she landed a book deal to republish her masterpiece. Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech will hit bookshelves on September 15 with a new foreword by me.

My small role in reviving interest in Paulina’s work has been one of the most gratifying experiences of the past two years. I first ran across her name in David Golumbia’s Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology. I read her book and, as it turns out, we live a few miles apart. So, we met up.

Mainstream journalists are now grasping for ways to explain Silicon Valley’s far-right radicalization. Some pretend it’s a new development and try to blame it on taxes, regulations, or other trite political rationalizations. But Borsook’s work proves—definitively—that tech’s right-wing politics are nothing new. As she wrote in 2000, explaining the anti-government, anti-public attitudes percolating in tech:

It’s an inability to reconcile the demands of being an individual with the demands of participating in society, which coincides beautifully with a preference for, and glorification of, being the solo commander of one’s computer in lieu of any other economically viable behavior.

Computers are so much more rule-based, controllable, fixable, and comprehensible than any human will ever be. As many political schools of thought do, these techno-libertarians make a philosophy out of a personality defect.

Cyberselfish will be published in the USA, the UK & Commonwealth, France, Belgium, and Switzerland. Please join me in pre-ordering it! Click here for more information.

Book club, anyone?

Pre-order at this Bookshop link to help support independent bookstores and the Nerd Reich newsletter.

Here is my interview with Paulina from last year (our second-biggest interview, with 142,000 views on YouTube alone!)

What should be an impossible occurrence has now become routine. The conservatives on the nation’s highest court continue to undermine democracy and the Constitution—and if they have to lie to do it, so be it. So perhaps we shouldn’t be all that surprised to learn that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Louisiana v. Callais, in which he blithely destroyed the Voting Rights…

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A cartoon by Pedro Molina. Related | Abolish ICE? America is warming to the idea.

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Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy unveiled a new family roadtrip reality TV series that he filmed with his wife and kids. Apparently, while Duffy was failing to address crumbling infrastructure, rehire air traffic controllers, and mounting travel delays, he was busy on vacation. “I wanted to lean into America’s 250th birthday,” Duffy told “Fox & Friends.” “Over the course of seven…

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Interior Secretary Doug Burgum recently tried, unsuccessfully, to feed cinnamon Altoids to a Park Police horse. Also, Burgum enjoys artificial intelligence, in particular “AI Teddy,” a planned exhibit at a new facility scheduled to open on July 4 at Theodore Roosevelt National Park. And, it seems, he likes the band Creed.

Those are among the idiosyncratic pieces of information communicated by Burgum during an 88-minute address Wednesday at an “All-Hands” meeting held for around 70,000 Interior Department employees.

In many ways, the Interior Department seems to be struggling. The Trump administration is working to slash the budget and workforce of department components like the US Geological Survey and National Park Service.
Meanwhile the department is racing to open federal lands to mining. And Interior is hurling billions of dollars and no-bid contracts toward what critics call “vanity projects” tied to Trump’s plan for MAGA-style celebrations of America’s 250th anniversary. Those festivities will include a UFC fight at the White House on the president’s 80th birthday and an Indy Car race around the National Mall.

But Burgum on Wednesday touted the department’s “administrative efficiency.” And, in often discursive remarks wending through DOI programs, he made various calls for reducing “red tape” and “redundancies.”

I watched video of Burgum’s remarks and heard from Interior Department employees, who, on the condition of anonymity, provided fact-checking, and mockery, of the secretary’s address.

Some pointed out the irony of Burgum causing thousands of federal employees with more pressing tasks to sit through a hour-and-a-half harangue on operating efficiently. It’s not clear how many DOI employees attended event in person or virtually. The department’s press office didn’t respond when asked how many people were on the call.

Employees pointed out that the first half of Burgum’s speech—organized around slides touting the words, “Gratitude,” “Humility,” Curiosity,” and “Courage”—largely repeated remarks Burgum made about a year ago at a previous departmental all-hands meeting. One department employee said that Burgum had even repeated some of the same anecdotes from the prior year. Employees also noted that for the second year in a row, as the meeting concluded, the Creed song “Higher” played in the auditorium.

Among notable asides was Burgum’s description of his encounter with Sibbell, a US Park Police horse that eats Altoids. Burgum informed the Interior Department that he had encountered the mare during a recent event celebrating plans for the NFL to hold its 2027 draft on the National Mall. “I pull out the Altoids, my favorite…cinnamon Altoids,” he said. “And she did not even blink. It was like: ‘I could care less about your cinnamon Altoids.'”

The upshot of the anedote was that Sibbell (like many horses) prefers mint-flavored candy. But it was also part of lengthy celebration of the Park Police, one component of Interior Department that is receiving more money under Trump. Burgum said that was due to that agency helping the Interior Department to play “a massive part” in the president’s effort to “get DC safe and beautiful.”

That is a euphemistic reference to the deeply unpopular occupation of Washington, DC that Trump began last year. As part of that effort, Burgum deputized immigration agents—who are part of the Department of Homeland Security—to accompany Park Police officers patrolling National Park land in DC. The Park Police helped ICE agents by conducting traffic stops on federal roads and property in the district, in what critics charge was racial profiling.

Park Police also helped carry out Trump’s push to remove homeless encampments in DC. Burgum said Wednesday the agency had “eliminated 82 homeless camps.” And he claimed that occurred without “a front page story and barely a back page story in the Washington Post. It wasn’t even covered.”

In fact, the Post and other outlets reported extensively on the homeless camp removals in stories that noted, contrary to Burgum’s claims Wednesday, that many of the people ousted from tents on federal land did not receive services, or beds in local shelters. Large numbers remain unhoused and some appear to have returned to their former camps.

But the secretary did not tarry on on such wrinkles. In his remarks, he touted Rwanda’s and Ecuador’s park management as worthy of US emulation. “If you’re an American and you wanted to go see the gorillas in Rwanda, or you want to go to the Galapagos Islands, get ready to pay about $800 a day,” Burgum said, in a justification for new fees on foreigners at national parks that critics argue are hurting tourism.

On Burgum’s instructions, the department is removing hundreds of signs and exhibits about American history and science from federal sites to comply with a Trump order to ensure placards are “uplifting” and free of “improper ideology.” As I’ve reported, the purge includes a sign at Fort Laramie in Wyoming about a funeral the US Army held for the daughter of a Lakota chief; signs at Glacier National Park about wildfires, wolves, and the use of dams to support agriculture; and placards at Big Bend National Park about fossils and geology.

But the Park Service is planning to open a new library at an entrance to Theodore Roosevelt National Park in Burgum’s home state of North Dakota as part of the 250th anniversary celebration. And Burgum on Wednesday sounded especially jazzed that the library plans to give visitors the chance to play “that parlor game, which figure in history would you like to have dinner with?”

An “AI Teddy,” Burgum said, will answer questions using words Roosevelt wrote or spoke during his lifetime. It’s unclear whether that will include racist statements Teddy made about Black people (“inferior to the whites”) or Native Americans (“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every 10 are”).

Burgum, who last year signed a memorandum of understanding with the United Arab Emirates to collaborate on artificial intelligence, touts the technology as a way for the department to improve efficiency. “If you’re concerned about AI taking your job, then I would just say learn how to use AI and, and, and your job will get better,” he said Wednesday.

Amid the DOGE-driven firing of thousands of National Park Service employees, that agency had lost nearly a quarter of its workforce by mid-2025. Much of the department faces new proposed budget cuts. For a number of remaining employees—many of whom say they feel overworked and beset by ill-advised initiatives from the Trump administration—Burgum’s touting of “administrative efficiency” landed poorly.  

Burgum “has implemented 1,700 bureaucratic hurdles on everything we do,” one DOI employee wrote. “No exhibits or social media posts without approval. No travel without approval. Credit card limits…This is the main dissonance of his entire message.”

The all-hands event included awards to department employees who had excelled at cutting “red-tape,” and a QR code for “Interior’s Innovation & Red Tape Reduction Survey.” That form allows agency employees to identify inefficiencies “in the context of mission delivery at Interior…that, if solved, could result in demonstrable improvements in your daily work life and in benefits to industry or the American public.”

The form is publicly accessible, and the Resistance Rangers, a group  of current and former National Park Service employees, this week asked its followers to weigh in and send Burgum a message: “fund our parks and stop censoring science and history.”

On Wednesday, the White House released a new “United States Counterterrorism Strategy,” the first such directive since a 2021 Biden-era memo emphasizing the need to combat white supremacist violence, which has now been scrubbed from the White House website.

Wednesday’s document, masterminded by White House “counterterrorism czar” Sebastian Gorka, does not mention far-right violence at all. It identifies “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists” as a security threat of equal severity to “Legacy Islamist Terrorists” and “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs.” The administration will now apparently “prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

In a bizarre but familiar turn, the document also blames transgender people for the shooting of Charlie Kirk. “Americans have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.”

The Heritage Foundation has also worked to connect being trans with terrorism, campaigning for the FBI to designate trans advocacy as violent extremism. 

Gorka told reporters at a press conference Wednesday that the administration would “crush” any threat, “whether it is the cartels, the jihadists or violent left-wing extremists like antifa—and like the transgender killers, the nonbinary, the left-wing radicals who killed my friend, Charlie Kirk, we will take them on, head on.”

In 2023, Trump claimed falsely that there had been an “incredible rise” in the number of transgender shooters, claims that now resurface whenever shootings occur. 

But the document reads less like a plan than a list of targets. Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), the House Committee on Homeland Security’s ranking Democrat, noted in a press release that the document left out the far right—the group most likely to commit violent acts against civilians on US soil—“despite years of data proving that right-wing extremism has presented the most persistent and deadly threats to Americans for decades.”

Instead, Thompson said, the White House had produced “a document full of fake administration counterterrorism ‘achievements,’ including mass deportations and more than 40 unauthorized and deadly military strikes on vessels in the Western Hemisphere. There are zero strategic objectives, lines of effort, or agency assignments.”

Counterterrorism itself is a politicized term that came into common use following the September 11 attacks and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It formed part of the language of the policing apparatus that targeted Muslim and Arab Americans and legitimized surveillance of those communities as “terrorist threats.” That same language is now being applied to transgender people. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has called Kirk’s death a “domestic 9/11.” The Heritage Foundation, too, has done its best to connect being transgender with the idea of terrorism, campaigning last year for the FBI to designate trans advocacy as violent extremism. 

“We will…identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally,” the document says. 

President Donald Trump would like the American public to stop talking so much about skyrocketing gas prices, humanitarian disasters, governmental corruption, and his own incompetence—and instead focus on little green men. Or, to be more precise, blurry and unclear photos that could maybe possibly (but not very likely) be little green men, or whatever color alien beings might be.

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio was evasive when asked whether he confronted Pope Leo XIV over the pope’s criticisms of the Trump administration during their meeting on Thursday at the Vatican. “I’m not going to discuss what I talked about with the pope,” Rubio said. “I told you guys before I even came here, and that is that we have a very strong relationship with the fact we’ve worked with…

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President Donald Trump’s second major attempt to force his tariff policies onto global markets was rejected in a ruling by the Court of International Trade Thursday—the latest humiliating setback for the centerpiece of Trump’s economic agenda. In a 2-1 ruling, the court determined that Trump’s 10% global tariffs were “invalid” and “unauthorized by law.” “This decision is an important win…

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A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | Wait, Senate GOP wants to give Trump how much for his dumb ballroom?

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Donald Trump and his family have added billions to their net worth since Inauguration Day, with much of that new wealth coming from a dizzying array of crypto projects. But some of those gains are under threat, thanks to the crypto sector’s recent struggles. The latest blow is a second consecutive reported loss for Eric Trump’s American Bitcoin Corp, a wind-powered bitcoin mining company. The $82 million loss, from the first quarter of 2026, is largely due to the continued slump in bitcoin prices. It follows the same pattern as Trump Media and Technology Group—the parent company of the president’s Truth Social platform—which has lost $1.1 billion since its founding, almost entirely due to losses on bitcoin.

Both companies are using what’s known as a bitcoin treasury strategy—a relatively simple business plan wherein a firm just acquires as much bitcoin as possible. As long as the price of bitcoin goes up, the company gets more valuable. The problem is, the plan only works if the price of bitcoin goes up, and for the last seven months, the price of Bitcoin has mostly been down. The price of one bitcoin peaked late last year at $126,198, then collapsed all the way to $64,856 in February. Since the end of the first quarter, it has partially rebounded to around $80,000.

The strategy was first pioneered by investor Michael Saylor, who has used his company Strategy to acquire more than 813,000 bitcoins. It was a system that served his company’s stock price well, helping it rocket from around $50 in January 2024, to more than $405 a share last July. Saylor has been something of an evangelist for this strategy, and for bitcoin generally; Eric Trump has repeatedly cited Saylor as a model for his own ambitions.

But Saylor’s stock price has crashed, its down to around $181, and the company’s bitcoin supply has plummeted in value as well. Saylor’s company posted a $12.5 billion loss in the first quarter, and he has suggested he will begin “actively managing” the company’s bitcoin hoard, rather than simply accumulating more and more.

The good news for Eric Trump and his father is that if the price of bitcoin continues to bounce back, the strategy can become highly profitable again. And the federal government, a branch of which Donald Trump controls, may soon be stepping in to give the price of bitcoin a nice goose.

There are two major opportunities for the Trump administration to do something positive for the price of bitcoin in the coming weeks:

• Passage of the CLARITY Act: One of the most unsettling things about crypto for a lot of investors is the lack of regulatory certainty. Trump has vowed to make the United States the “crypto capital” by passing landmark legislation, the CLARITY Act, which is supposed to establish cryptocurrency as a legitimate, if somewhat lightly-regulated, investment tool. The legislation has been stalled in Congress for much of the last year, in part due to Democratic opposition over conflict-of-interest concerns involving Trump. But a compromise was reached this week in the House, and now the bill needs to pass the Senate; Trump is aiming to sign it by July 4. Just based on the news that it had passed the House, the price of bitcoin jumped over $80,000 for the first time in months this week.
• US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve: The US government already owns a lot of bitcoin, mainly thanks to the seizure of digital currency in criminal cases. Last March, Trump issued an executive order directing the US government to do essentially what Trump Media and Technology Group and American Bitcoin are doing: intentionally build as big a pile of bitcoin as possible. Trump hasn’t given any real specific reasons why the US government should do this—he has generally alluded to the need to beat China—but it would be a boon for bitcoin, a full-throated endorsement by the US government of the idea that bitcoin is a valuable thing that should be accumulated. There hasn’t been a ton of action on this plan, but in late April, an administration crypto adviser said that a “big announcement” is coming soon.

Neither move would necessarily return bitcoin’s price to last year’s stratospheric levels. But if the Trump administration’s efforts boost the price even a little, it will be a major win for the First Family’s bottom line.

JUST IN: White House Executive Director says there will be a "big announcmentvin the next few" weeks regarding a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve pic.twitter.com/ZmCOfxuJaD

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) April 27, 2026

The redistricting news for Democrats has gone from bad to worse.

A week after the US Supreme Court effectively destroyed the Voting Rights Act, opening the door to Southern states invalidating majority-Black districts across the South, the Virginia Supreme Court on Friday overturned a redistricting referendum approved by voters last month that was expected to net Democrats four new US House seats.

These two decisions by conservative-dominated courts now put Democrats at a significant disadvantage in the gerrymandering arms race launched by Donald Trump last summer when he ordered Texas to gerrymander five new Republican seats.

With the passage of the Virginia map, Democrats had mostly succeeded in reaching a draw with Republicans in the redistricting wars. But with the Virginia map overturned and Southern states—including Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina—rushing to pass new maps before the midterms, Democrats could face a four to five-seat disadvantage heading into November, according to Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report. While that is not insurmountable in a wave election—and Democrats could still pick up two seats in Virginia under the existing map—it gives Democrats little margin for error in the effort to take back the House.

In the 4-3 decision, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the April referendum violated the state Constitution because amendments must be passed twice by the legislature, with an election in between. The first time they passed it was after early voting started, so it doesn’t count. “This constitutional violation incurably taints the resulting referendum vote,” the court wrote, “and nullifies its legal efficacy.”

In a dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Cleo Powell wrote that the majority had “broadened the meaning of the word ‘election,’ as used in the Virginia Constitution, to include the early voting period. This is in direct conflict with how both Virginia and federal law define an election.”

The decision effectively tosses out three million votes cast in the referendum on a legal technicality. It’s worth noting that voters in red states have not been able to weigh in on any of the mid-decade gerrymanders passed by their legislatures. And while those states have different laws than Virginia, voters in Florida and Ohio did pass prohibitions on gerrymandering that their legislatures flagrantly ignored—but conservative-dominated state supreme courts in those states are unlikely to void the new maps.

It’s impossible to ignore the national context: It appears that Democrats are bound by one set of rules while Republicans play by another, and Republican-appointed judges have repeatedly put their collective thumb on the scale of elections to make sure their party prevails.

The notorious Florida immigrant detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz” may be winding down operations soon, Gov. Ron DeSantis acknowledged on Thursday. His remarks came just hours after the New York Times reported that federal and state officials are in preliminary discussions about the facility’s closure.

The DeSantis administration erected the makeshift detention camp in the Everglades last summer when the Department of Homeland Security needed more detention space to house immigrants pending their deportations. “This is going to be a force multiplier, and we’re really happy to be working with the federal government to satisfy President Trump’s mandate,” DeSantis said last summer. The detention facility has become a symbol of the Trump administration’s relentless crackdown on immigrants.

At a press conference in Lakeland, Florida, DeSantis said that Alligator Alcatraz has held nearly 22,000 immigrants who were eventually deported. “I have no doubt that that has made the state of Florida safer,” he said. “We stepped up when no other state stepped up to help in a very big way.” He added that Alligator Alcatraz was always meant to be a temporary facility, “If we shut the lights on it tomorrow, we will be able to say it served its purpose.”

“We stepped up when no other state stepped up to help in a very big way…If we shut the lights on it tomorrow, we will be able to say it served its purpose.”

Over the last year, the center has come under fire both for its living conditions, its environmental impact on the Everglades, and that it was located on sacred tribal land. As I reported in April:

Thousands of people have been detained there despite ongoing reports of mosquito infestations, flooding, poor medical care, lackluster food, and limited water access. Last month, two US senators said they launched an investigation into reported abuses, including the use of “the box,” in which detainees were allegedly shackled and held in small cages in direct sunlight for hours at a time. (A spokesperson for the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which runs Alligator Alcatraz, told me recently that the allegations were “false.”) In recent weeks, the center landed in the spotlight once again after attorneys representing immigrants held there told a judge that guards had assaulted and pepper-sprayed detainees who protested after the phones were shut off, less than a week after a federal judge ordered legal access should be expanded at the facility.

Alligator Alcatraz has also been at the center of a few lawsuits, including one filed by environmentalist groups who argued that construction had proceeded without an environmental review or opportunity for public comment, in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Florida and Trump officials argued that NEPA is restricted to federal agencies, and that the facility was operated and funded by the state, which has spent at least $390 million to run it. Last month, an appeals court ruled that the center can remain open:

The three-judge panel heard oral arguments in the case on April 7 and released a 38-page ruling late Tuesday afternoon. In the 2–1 decision, judges concluded that the environmentalists failed to prove Alligator Alcatraz was under federal control. Florida also hasn’t received any federal funding (though it is in the process of requesting reimbursement). “Federal authority is, at most, indirect: it is involved in the construction only insofar as it sets the terms for which the facility may be used for detention of aliens, but Florida officials dedicated its land to that use,” wrote Chief Judge William Pryor, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, in the majority opinion. 

Judge Nancy Abudu, a Biden appointee, wrote in her dissent that immigration is ultimately a federal obligation and the majority’s ruling is “just plain wrong.” “So long as Florida remains a willing participant in the federal government’s immigration detention scheme, it subjects itself to the federal government’s substantial control over the parties’ joint efforts,” she wrote. 

It’s unclear when Alligator Alcatraz will close. As of this week, detainees were still being held there. Immigrant advocates and attorneys, however, were cautiously optimistic this week. Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, who has opposed the camp, said its closure is “long overdue,” she wrote on X. “For months, thousands have been detained there in inhumane conditions without meaningful due process–while wasting millions of taxpayer dollars. It is time for dignity & accountability to be restored.”

The recent Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which effectively killed the last remaining provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, was authored by Justice Samuel Alito. But it represents the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts. The Roberts Court has now gutted the Voting Rights Act on three different occasions, and Roberts wrote or joined every one of those opinions. And that’s not an accident. Roberts has been trying to kill the Voting Rights Act for more than 40 years, and it looks like he’s finally succeeded.

Watch our new video to understand how Roberts has steadily worked to destroy the Voting Rights Act and what can be done to fight back.