Political News

Ashleigh Hallam teaches English as a second language at her local library in Indiana. Soccer is now teaching her Spanish as a second language. For her, this World Cup couldn’t make more sense. Hallam is among a sizable number of English-speaking people in the U.S. who are doing something these days that might be considered a bit surprising: They’re watching broadcasts of World Cup…

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A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | Republicans stoop lower than ever to protect flimsy House majority…

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A federal judge handed President Trump two new losses in his war against whatever he perceives as diversity, equity, and inclusion.

U.S. District Judge William Orrick issued a preliminary injunction to freeze Trump’s effort to place anti-DEI conditions on federal grants in multiple cities in Oregon and California, ruling that the move overstepped Congress’s power of the purse.

Grants at risk due to Trump’s move include those that deal with assistance for victims of domestic violence and human trafficking, disaster relief efforts, terrorism preparedness, and “a range of initiatives designed to expand and strengthen services for crime victims, including funding specialized assistance for children, elders, and victims of technology-facilitated abuse.”

“Plaintiffs maintain that ‘[n]othing in the Constitution or federal statutes authorizes Defendants to impose the Challenged Conditions, or anything of the kind, on funds administered through congressional grant programs,’” Orrick wrote. “I agree.”

This is at least the third time in recent weeks that Trump has had an anti-DEI measure temporarily struck down by the courts.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cut off a safety investigation into eight National Guard pilots who were suspended after they used military helicopters to buzz a crowded beach.

Crowds gathered to celebrate the Fourth of July on the coast of South Carolina were treated to a “Salute to the Shore” demonstration, featuring low-flying Apache helicopters manned by members of the South Carolina Army National Guard. But the moment that the officers landed, they all received notice that they had been suspended, ABC15 reported.

In a statement, Major Lisa Allen confirmed that the officers were suspended pending an investigation into possible safety violations that occurred during their demonstration. She said she could not provide further details or speculate on any specific allegations, but she stressed that the suspension was “not punitive.”

“A temporary suspension from flight duties is a routine administrative measure whenever a flight profile is under review,” she said.

MAGA was abuzz over the fact that no reason had been given—and caught the eye of Hegseth.

“We’ll fix this. Carry on, Patriots,” Hegseth wrote in a post on X Thursday.

The next day, Assistant Defense Secretary Sean Parnell announced that “effective immediately, the suspension of all involved South Carolina pilots has been lifted.”

This isn’t the first time Hegseth has personally intervened to get officers out of trouble. He previously reinstated two suspended pilots who’d decided to fly their helicopters around Kid Rock’s house during a No Kings protest in March.

Reid Rasner, an openly gay Republican running for Wyoming’s lone House of Representatives seat, is suing members of his own party for defamation stemming from homophobia.

Semafor reports that Rasner is pursuing a case against former Wyoming State Senator Austin “Kit” Jennings, who allegedly pushed rumors that Rasner committed sexual misconduct. The rumors began after Rasner garnered national attention in 2025 for making a personal $47 billion bid to buy the social media site TikTok, and got worse from there.

Rasner, who came out when he was 20, is also settling a case against an Iowa man who repeatedly called him a “pedophile” under his campaign’s Facebook posts. The man claims that his accusation was based on “multiple social media posts and news articles accusing Reid Rasner of serious sexual misconduct,” but didn’t specify any specific posts.

Meanwhile, Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray, who is running against Rasner in the Republican primary, piled on and issued a poll telling respondents that Rasner “married his gay husband in New York.” That poll showed Rasner initially behind Gray by single digits, but losing support after voters were told about his sexuality.

“I’ve never experienced anything like this in my entire life,” said Rasner, 42, to Semafor. “This just isn’t the Wyoming I knew or thought I knew. The state needs to come to terms with the hate and ignorance that’s fueled death threats and violence against me, all because of my sexuality.”

“Everyone told me: Don’t file lawsuits,” Rasner said. “I should have filed them on Day One.”

According to Rasner, certain candidate forums have chosen not to invite him after the rumors started, including one held by the Wyoming Family Alliance, which opposes same-sex marriage.

Even with gay people in President Trump’s administration, such as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the Republican Party still has a lot of homophobia. The pedophile and “groomer” slurs actually began as buzzwords for conservatives to attack the LGBTQ community. Rasner can’t be too surprised at the reaction to his campaign in a deep-red state like Wyoming.

Palm Beach International airport was rebranded Donald J. Trump International Airport on Thursday and there are already signs that the name change could hurt tourism in the region. The rebranding occurred due to a law passed by Florida Republicans and approved by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who Trump dubbed “Ron DeSanctimonious” during their contentious presidential primary fight. The state’s Democrats…

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President Donald Trump on Friday officially said he wouldn’t sign a bipartisan affordable housing bill that Republicans wanted to run on in this year’s midterm elections, posting on social media in all caps that his decision is in “PROTEST” over the fact that the GOP-controlled Congress hasn’t passed a bill to suppress voting rights. The housing bill—which, among other things…

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A cartoon by Mike Luckovich. Related | Trump says he isn’t corrupt—he’s just lucky…

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American wages have stagnated, while the cost of living—affected by rising inflation and the unending Iran war—continues to climb. Yet the vice president has not been shy about the fact that he is, comparatively, living very large.

JD Vance joined Dirty Jobs star Mike Rowe’s podcast Thursday to chat about faith, family, and the future of America. But amid the pair’s sprawling conversation, the vice president offered a bit of insight into how his new role has offered him a completely new lifestyle.

“My life is—dude, totally transformed,” Vance said, eliciting laughter from Rowe.

Vance earns a base official salary of $235,100 per year as America’s second-in-command, but of course the accoutrements of his high-powered office provide a litany of other perks.

“I don’t go to the grocery store anymore. People go to the grocery store for me. Most of my meals—like, when I cook a meal—I love to cook, actually. Big baker. I like to cook for my kids as a special occasion, but I don’t have to cook anymore because I have an army of people willing to cook my food,” he continued.

“My life is so weird. I fly around on a 757, no more TSA lines for me and the kids. It’s so weird, but it can become the sort of thing that if you internalize it, you start to become an entitled asshole,” Vance said.

Vance: My life is-- dude, totally transformed. People go to the grocery store for me. I don't have to cook anymore because I have an army of people willing to cook my food. No more TSA lines for me. pic.twitter.com/4ystwLEKcG

— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) July 10, 2026

Maybe that executive branch dissonance could explain why Donald Trump claimed that Americans need to provide identification in order to go to the grocery store, or why the president has repeatedly insisted that groceries is “an old-fashioned word.”

“We have a term ‘groceries,’” Trump told the leaders of the United Arab Emirates last year. “It’s an old term, but it means basically what you’re buying, food, it’s a pretty accurate term but it’s an old-fashioned sound.”

Affordability is the chief concern for Americans heading into the midterm elections, according to an April Gallup poll. In January, a New York Times/Siena poll found that 65 percent of American voters felt that a middle-class lifestyle was out of reach, while 77 percent said that a middle-class life was more difficult to attain than it was a generation before. All in all, a majority of Americans feel that they’ve been priced out of a broad range of necessities, including education, health care, and having a family.

Those sentiments have surely only been exacerbated in the months since. The cost of oil and gas has skyrocketed since the onset of the Iran war; utility bills have continued to climb; health insurance premiums have drastically outpaced the growth of employee paychecks; and homeownership seems like an increasingly unattainable dream due to low market availability and astronomical prices.

Meanwhile, the White House has repeatedly detached itself from efforts that would aid America’s middle and lower classes. Case in point: Trump’s decision Friday morning to divorce his office from the bipartisan housing bill. Trump did so in another futile attempt to force through his unpopular voter ID bill, the SAVE America Act.

President Trump’s attacks on wind power could have a devastating effect on Minnesota. 

The state has four wind energy projects that could bring 1,200 construction jobs, 4,400 other jobs connected to the projects, and over $168 million in economic impacts to the state, the Minnesota Reformer reports, citing the progressive think tank North Star Policy Action. 

The Trump administration has stopped the Department of Defense from completing legally mandated national security reviews of proposed wind farms, basically halting their construction across the country. In total, over 250 such projects have been stalled, four of them in the Gopher State, with $1.6 billion in investments behind them. 

“Minnesota has spent decades building one of the strongest wind energy economies in the country, and the federal government is now actively dismantling that through a permitting process turned into an indefinite roadblock,” said Aaron Rosenthal, North Star Policy Action’s research director, to the Reformer.

The St. Paul-based think tank’s report points out that the four wind projects would have a combined output of 1,119 megawatts, more than that of Xcel Energy’s Prairie Island nuclear power plant in the state. Minnesota has a mandate to have 100 percent carbon-free electricity in the state by 2040, and these wind projects would be a big step forward. 

Under President Biden, wind power got a big boost across the U.S., with the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act bringing billions of dollars of federal loans, tax credits, and grants. But Trump has a long-standing hatred of wind power going back to a bitter fight years ago against wind turbines built near his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland. 

On the first day of his second term as president, Trump signed an executive order freezing wind power permits both on- and off-shore. That lasted until June this year, when the administration abandoned its effort to defend the order in court. But Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said last year that he would have to personally approve any federal solar and wind permits, stalling national projects.  

“We have not approved one windmill since I’ve been in office. And we’re going to keep it that way. My goal is to not let any windmill be built,” Trump said in March. To satisfy the president’s vendetta, the federal government has been buying out developers and companies seeking to build wind projects. 

Wind power is abundant in the U.S., especially in the Midwest, and doesn’t produce carbon emissions or pollution. The costs to set up wind farms are rapidly dropping, and it only takes 6 to 9 miles per hour—a gentle breeze—to get turbines to spin and generate electricity. But to the anti-green Trump administration, anything that isn’t oil and gas should be shut down, even if it means higher electricity bills. 

Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch responded to President Trump’s most recent attack, framing the White House’s hostile 162-page July 4 report as a gross misrepresentation of what the storied cultural institution actually does.

“While there will always be room for improvement, this report is not a fair characterization of the work and totality of the National Museum of American History,” Bunch said in an internal letter obtained by ABC News. “At the Smithsonian, our work is driven by scholarship, accuracy, and an uncompromising commitment to tell the fullness of America’s story.… As public servants and the keepers of this institution, we are charged with helping a nation find understanding, hope, and clarity and as part of that duty, we are dedicated to excellence, reflection, and growth.”

The White House’s Domestic Policy Council essentially called the Smithsonian an extremist, anti-white, anti-American organization, writing that the museum “has become subject to institutional capture by a radical, activist ideology that is fundamentally opposed to telling the noble, honest story of the great country we know and love.”

“As it stands today, it would benefit most Americans, especially parents bringing their children for a tour, if the Smithsonian’s flagship history museum had a label at every entrance that reads: ‘Warning: the exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country,’” the report concluded.

Bunch, who is the Smithsonian’s first Black chief and whose time leading the institution may very well be limited, encouraged his staff to continue to use their work to “find understanding, hope, and clarity.”

How much can you really love America if you’re not willing to see all sides of its history, from its most triumphant moments to its most abhorrent ones? Everything contained in the Smithsonian museums—from the National African American History and Culture Museum to the American Art Museum—is there because it had an outsize impact on American culture. It seems that the right just can’t handle hearing anything negative about this country at all, regardless of how truthful it is.

President Donald Trump tried to take credit for Walmart’s summer sale, but it seems he didn’t have anything to do with lowering prices.

White House senior deputy press secretary Kush Desai crashed out Thursday when faced with a report that Trump didn’t deserve any credit for Walmart’s recent price reduction on beef, which has seen an average national price increase of 13 percent in the last year.

“The President and Walmart’s announcement was that the sale is extending all summer long,” he wrote on X. “This is a big win for Americans. The media’s obsessive need to try to undermine any good news when it affects President Trump is pathological.”

Trump announced Monday that he’d directed the country’s largest grocer to initiate massive price cuts—but the company’s standard seasonal sale was already underway.

“I have just been informed that one of the biggest, best, and smartest Retailers in America, Walmart, will be lowering prices, by a lot, at my Administration’s request to celebrate our great Country’s 250th birthday,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Walmart will, in particular, be dropping the price for a pound of ground beef by almost 15%, among many other products.”

But a spokesperson for Walmart told The Bulwark Thursday that the retailer had begun one of its price “rollback” events last week—before Trump declared he’d won a discount for millions of Americans.

In a press release Monday, Walmart announced that it would lower prices for barbecue essentials like ground beef, potato chips, and soda. Nowhere in the press release did the company mention the Trump administration, or the country’s 250th anniversary.

Trump’s Department of Agriculture has begun a pressure campaign on grocers to lower beef prices, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. But when the USDA called up Walmart, the retailer said it already had plans to reduce prices for the summer, including for beef, two people familiar with the matter told the Journal.

Walmart ran a Walmart Deals campaign between June 22 and June 28. It appears that the company already had plans to extend the sale after that date without any urging from Trump at all.

Under orders from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the U.S. Navy is set to adopt a rule that would allow Black soldiers to be purged simply because of their facial hair. Currently, the Navy issues permanent shaving waivers to members with certain skin conditions caused by shaving, especially a condition known as pseudofolliculitis barbae, commonly known as razor bumps. This is a condition…

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Consider supporting my work so I can continue creating it: Substack: https://nickanderson.substack.com/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/editorialcartoons Ko-Fi: https://www.patreon.com/c/editorialcartoonsCartoon Related | Trump’s big birthday bash for America was a bust…

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Nine months after delivering his widely mocked “beardo” speech, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is still fuming about the military’s (according to him) lax attitude toward grooming standards.

Hegseth has recently complained in private about seeing service members with facial hair, going so far as to suggest that the military’s senior leadership has not fully embraced his new appearance and hygiene requirements, according to U.S. officials that spoke with CBS News Friday.

One unidentified official told the network that Hegseth was frustrated that his speech last year did not produce immediate results.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell attributed Hegseth’s anger to his high expectations.

“Secretary Hegseth maintains the highest expectations for our service members to uphold the professional standards of appearance, fitness, and discipline that define our warfighting force, and he continues to emphasize consistent enforcement of hair, weight, and grooming standards across all ranks,” Parnell said in a statement to CBS News.

“Commanders at every level are expected to lead by example by meeting these standards, implementing these requirements, and they will be held accountable for delivering results as the Department works to restore a culture of excellence and readiness,” Parnell continued. “Our Armed Forces are stronger when every service member meets and exceeds these expectations.”

Last September, Hegseth ordered hundreds of America’s top military commanders to leave their international posts to attend a mandatory in-person assembly in Quantico, Virginia, during which the hairphobic ex–Fox News host unveiled his agenda to de-woke the country’s armed forces.

The plan involved snipping away shaving waivers, despite the disproportionate impact that the requirement would have on Black service members, who are more frequently diagnosed with pseudofolliculitis barbae—or chronic razor bumps—due to the curl pattern of the hair and the subsequent injurious effects of frequently shaving their faces. The painful inflammatory condition has been estimated to affect somewhere between 45 percent to 83 percent of the Black male population in the U.S.

“No more beardos,” Hegseth said during his address. “Calling someone to shave, or work hard, is exactly the kind of workforce we want.”

“The era of rampant and ridiculous shaving profiles is done,” Hegseth noted at the time, adding that anyone unwilling to comply should look for a “new position or a new profession.”

Branches of the military have distributed their own internal guidance per the new grooming mandate, revealing that even those with medical exemptions will not be allowed to receive accommodations past 12 consecutive months.

The Trump administration wants to fence off parts of Pennsylvania Avenue outside of the White House, shutting down a historic space for political protests.

The Washington Post reports that the administration and Secret Service plan to put fences where Pennsylvania Avenue crosses 15th and 17th Streets NW, allowing them to close pedestrian access if they decide there are security risks.

Multiple presidential administrations have used temporary barriers on Pennsylvania Avenue, but the Secret Service’s suggestion to erect permanent fences there has faced pushback as a clear attempt to restrict public access to the White House. The Trump administration is also planning to put up permanent fencing around Lafayette Square, a public park across from the White House and another historic protest space.

The fences on Pennsylvania Avenue would affect multiple organizations that are located on the street, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery and the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream. And new fencing could cut off the public’s view of the White House and deter, if not outright bar, pedestrians from getting through.

“This would mean that residents and tourists alike would be unable to see the White House from any reasonable distance, especially if Trump plants more trees in the Park,” said Michael McGill, a former General Services Administration official who also served on the Capitol Planning Commission, in an email to the Post, referring to Trump’s other plan to plant 47 trees in Lafayette Park.

In May, parts of Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and Lafayette Square were painted with yellow lines to allow cars to park during special events over the summer, including President Trump’s “UFC Freedom 250” birthday fight and fan festival at the Ellipse. Trump has gone out of his way to remake the White House (like his ballroom) and the parts of Washington near it without any regard for public opinion.

The men who were in Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s vehicle when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed him on Tuesday say he did not try ram the immigration agents’ unmarked car—directly contradicting ICE’s version of events.

The agents stated that Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant and father of three who was on his way to work, had ignored their verbal commands, “weaponized his vehicle,” and tried to run over one of them. The agent shot him and claimed self-defense.

“That is a lie,” Jose Trinidad Rojas, 51, said in a handwritten statement offered to The Washington Post by his lawyer, Hugo Balderas-Ibarra. “It is impossible for them to say that they were going to get run over.... There were no officers in front of or behind the vehicle. They were on the sides.... Lorenzo thought we had lost them but suddenly they surrounded us.”

Balderas-Ibarra said he spoke to Rojas and the two other passengers—Daniel Tirado Pantoja and Victor Salgado, Salgado Araujo’s brother—separately, and each stated that ICE lied about Salgado Araujo’s violent intent. Victor also said that agents began firing from their vehicle’s passenger side, striking his brother in the abdomen and then mocking him while he bled out, saying, “You wanted to escape, right?”

All four men in the car had been in the United States for at least two decades. They were arrested and taken into custody shortly after the shooting.

Not only do these witnesses say ICE is lying, the footage of the incident suggests they were too. Video obtained by local outlet KHOU 11 shows the agents tried to box Salgado Araujo’s car in with their unmarked black SUV, initiating the conflict. When Salgado Araujo made a U-turn and fled in the other direction, the agents (who could have been anyone to him, as they were in an unmarked vehicle) followed him. Even worse, The New York Times reported that Salgado Araujo wasn’t even the intended target—they were hunting two immigrants from Guatemala. Now Salgado Araujo is dead for no reason. He is the tenth person to be fatally shot by federal immigration agents since President Trump returned to office.

The conventional media wisdom is that Maine GOP Senator Susan Collins is sitting back and laughing this week, and well she might be. The collapse of Graham Platner’s campaign is an implosion for the ages, and it puts the state’s Democrats in a tricky situation they need to navigate skillfully in these next two weeks.

But November is a long way away. If—and it’s a big but by no means insurmountable if—the Democrats make it through these next two weeks without too many bruises and unite behind a nominee, Collins is still going to be fighting for her life in a Democratic state where Donald Trump’s approval rating is 36 percent, where 85 percent say the state’s economy is fair or poor, and where the generic Democratic congressional edge in one recent poll is a hefty 11 percent. Those are all terrifying numbers for Collins, and she knows it.

Before we get into all that, a few closing thoughts on Platner. I wrote about him a month ago, after The New York Times published some unsavory revelations about his treatment of some former girlfriends (while others said he was fine toward them), and right before the primary. I wrote that since he was almost certain to be the nominee, national Democrats needed to back him.

I did, however, add three caveats, as experience has taught me to do in such situations: “Short of revelations involving murder, rape, or a taste for child pornography, Platner needs to be backed by Democrats to the hilt.” Well, he managed one out of three, but one is enough. It’s utterly and obviously disqualifying.

Some Platner defenders have tried to say, What about innocent until proven guilty? That’s ridiculous in the context of running for office. Yes, it means everything in a court of law, where a defendant is on trial for his very freedom; there, he is absolutely entitled to a presumption of innocence, and he must be given his day in court so that we all hear his side. But a political campaign isn’t a criminal trial. In a political campaign, political judgments must be made, and the clear political judgment here is that no party can back someone facing a credible allegation of rape, for God’s sake.

As for the intentionally weak vetting of Platner by the young leftist strategists who “discovered” him: I hope people have learned some obvious lessons. Daniel Moraff, the person who’s apparently largely responsible for this debacle, told The Wall Street Journal last month that he sensed a public thirsting for non-cookie-cutter candidates who challenge the status quo. That’s surely true, in a lot of places, but it hardly means you don’t need to put your candidates through the usual paces. It’s grotesquely arrogant and irresponsible, and if Collins ends up winning, Moraff will bear a huge share of the blame.

However: I still say, Moraff and Platner aside, Collins could well be in far more trouble with a new Democratic nominee. Kamala Harris beat Trump by seven points in the state. And as I noted above, in a recent poll, respondents said that for Congress, they’d choose a Democrat over a Republican by 53 percent to 42 percent. On top of that, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Hannah Pingree, who will be at the top of the ticket, looks like she’s going to beat her Republican foe by around 15 points. That means Collins is going to have to convince a lot of independents to switch from the D column to the R one as they move down the ballot from governor to senator.

Collins has won such voters before, but I would remind people, as they look over past elections for parallels, to take note not only of what’s similar but of what’s different.

The main (as it were) case in point here is 2014. Shenna Bellows, the current secretary of state and a leading contender to replace Platner, was the Democratic nominee against Collins that year. Collins blew her out by 30 points, which some say should raise a lot of red flags.

Well, there are a host of differences between 2014 and today. One, Bellows was a 39-year-old novice then, who had never held office and whose claim to fame was that she had been the head of the state’s ACLU. Two, it was the sixth year of a Democratic incumbent presidency, a notoriously hard year for candidates of said party. Three, the Maine of 2014 was in such a cantankerous state that it reelected embarrassing extremist loudmouth Paul LePage as its governor. Four, it was pre-Trump, which changes everything. Five, it was before Collins’s vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court justice because she took him at his word that Roe v. Wade was “settled law.”

I’m not saying Bellows should be the choice. I don’t know enough about the available candidates or the ins and outs of Maine politics. That’s up to those 600 Democratic delegates to sort out and decide. I’m just saying that what’s past isn’t always prologue. The point is what’s going on now. And what’s going on now, nationally and in Maine, is a strong anti-Trump sentiment—and a GOP incumbent senator who voted to confirm 22 of Trump’s 23 Cabinet nominees.

What the Maine Democratic Party, and to some extent the national Democratic Party, has to do here is run a process that is widely accepted as having two qualities: It must be transparent, and it has to feel fair. The party needs to give voters and citizens regular updates on the process—this is happening today; this is happening next Tuesday—so that everyone feels they’re in the loop and no one feels sandbagged. And it needs to feel fair so that in the end, everyone at least feels that they need to accept the outcome.

As for the national party, I hope Chuck Schumer has the sense to stay completely out of this. His fear of Platner turns out to have been justified, but the way he pushed Governor Janet Mills—who ran as if she didn’t really want to be there—into the race only helped Platner score the nomination. If Schumer and national Democrats are perceived as putting their finger on the scale for a candidate—for instance, in order to stop former state Senate Majority Leader Troy Jackson, who is widely seen as most Platner-like in his populist politics—they’ll only sow rancor and help Collins in the long run.

In the short term, this was a good week for Susan Collins. But to paraphrase Harry Hopkins, people don’t vote in the short term. They vote in November. By then, she could very well be regretting this week’s events.

Republican primary voters really one-upped the contest for who can pick the most unpalatable nominee, officially choosing Victor Marx—a lunatic who has made wild claims about everything from killing people to being a military hero—as their nominee for governor in Colorado. Marx was officially declared the winner on Thursday evening, besting state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer by less than half a…

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On Monday,  Ulises Peña López, represented by Disability Law United and Pangea Legal Services, sued the US government and private prison contractors GeoGroup and CoreCivic over his arrest by ICE officers and his following treatment in ICE detention facilities. Peña López was deported to Mexico in October 2025 after spending six months in ICE detention.

Before his arrest, Peña López, a carpenter, already lived with disabilities due to a mini-stroke, which was diagnosed in August 2024, and was managed before his detention. The lawsuit contends that after ICE officers detained Peña López in February 2025 in Sunnyvale, California, they took him to an alleyway and beat him until he lost consciousness and required CPR.

His wife, Aby, and their young daughter witnessed part of the beating by ICE, according to the lawsuit.

Peña López’s ongoing symptoms, the lawsuit says, include new and worsening “headaches, weakness and numbness on his right side, eye pain, hearing loss, insomnia and nightmares, blurry vision, back pain, and difficulty walking.” Peña Lopez is unable to work to support himself, according to an interview with the NPR afilliate KQED.

“What I want more than anything, I can’t get back: to recover my health, to be with my wife and daughter, and to be able to work again,” Peña López told KQED.

The lawsuit filed for Peña López’s complaints cites the Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which mandates that places receiving federal funding, like ICE detention centers, accommodate disabled people, among other laws. Peña Lopez’s wife and children are also part of the lawsuit due to the distress his arrest and subsequent treatment caused them.

During Peña López’s eight months in ICE detention in facilities operated by GeoGroup and CoreCivic, the lawsuit says, López received inadequate medical care and was also mocked by employees for his disability.

The lawsuit alleges that staff’s verbal abuse was particularly cruel at Golden State Annex, operated by GeoGroup. Detention staff reportedly told Peña López that “motherfucker, you don’t get to be asleep” and “you’re never gonna walk again.”

During Peña López’s transfer to California City Detention Center last August, the lawsuit says, “detention staff denied Ulises timely administration of his daily medication, violated his disability rights, and subjected him to unnecessarily harsh conditions,” such as not getting adequate medical care. At the facility operated by CoreCivic, Peña López also struggled to get his medications. As a result, Peña López’s health worsened before he was deported.

A spokesperson for CoreCivic told Mother Jones that while the company does not generally comment on active litigation, “we can share that the safety, health and well-being of the people in our facilities is our top priority.”

For Peña López’s lawyers, this lawsuit represents not only a pursuit of López, but also of others mistreated by ICE.

“This lawsuit seeks accountability for the physical and emotional harms our clients suffered, but it also joins a growing wave of lawsuits challenging abusive ICE enforcement and detention practices,” said Elena Hodges, co-director at Pangea Legal Services, which is representing Peña López and his family, said in a press release.

“We hope this case will send a powerful message to immigrant communities that they are not alone,” Hodges, said, “and that ICE officials and private prison contractors are not above the law.”