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Continuing to debase itself, the Department of Justice filed an emergency appeal Friday in the Kennedy Center case, demanding that the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals stay the lower court’s order to remove President Donald Trump’s name from everything he illegally slapped it on. Debasing itself even further, the “appeal” is based on something that somehow the DOJ never got around to telling…

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Last year, the Trump administration was considering suspending the constitutional right of habeas corpus, The New York Times reports.

Some officials pushing President Trump’s mass deportation agenda, chiefly White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, wanted to get rid of the key right, which compels the government to explain in court why it has detained a person. Miller’s goal was to prevent immigrants in government custody from receiving hearings or court orders blocking their deportation.

This idea alarmed others in the Trump administration, who saw it as legally weak and likely to be overturned in court. Among them was Will Scharf, a right-wing lawyer serving as White House staff secretary, who was the last person who saw paperwork before it reached the president’s desk.

In April, Scharf wrote a secret memo to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles warning of the dangers of suspending habeas corpus, pointing out its legal pitfalls. He also wrote another memo to Wiles warning against invoking the Insurrection Act, another legally questionable idea pushed by some in the administration, including Miller.

In October, Scharf wrote a memo against invoking the act, saying that it “serves as a break-the-glass exception to the traditional, general prohibition on the use of the military in the domestic setting.” He pointed out that it was last used in 1992 during riots in Los Angeles at the request of the California governor, and its invocation would be unprecedented to use against immigration protesters.

After Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents in Minnesota in January, administration officials, led by Vice President JD Vance and Miller, revived the idea of using the Insurrection Act. Ultimately, it wasn’t invoked, and the government also did not suspend habeas corpus.

But the Trump administration has still continued to use authoritarian means to implement the president’s mass deportations, treating immigrants who have been in the country for decades as if they have just shown up at a U.S. border. The fact that Trump has not resorted to extreme legal arguments is only a minor victory as violent deportations and draconian immigration policies continue, as he considers federal courts inconvenient obstacles rather than a constitutionally mandated check on his power.

This post is updated throughout the day to reflect the latest incidents. It was last updated at 6:31 a.m..

Here’s what’s happening on the roads this morning…

▼︎ new incidents   ▼︎ long-term incidents

Road incidents as of 6:30 a.m. on June 15

• CHP helped with construction on Sr152 at Freedom Blvd. in Watsonville and Pajaro. The westbound lane was closed, and Sr152 was shut down between Freedom and 5th St., as well as from Ford St. to Main St. Drivers were told to use other routes. The incident was reported on June 14.
   
• There is one-way traffic on SR-129 at the Salsipueda Creek Bridge between Watsonville and Pajaro because of bridge work. This closure will last until 6:01 a.m. tomorrow.
   
• There will be alternating lane closures on both northbound and southbound Highway 9 at Pool Drive in San Lorenzo Valley because of bridge work. The closures will continue until April 30 at 6:59 a.m. in 2027.
   
• A lane on westbound SR-152 at Clifford Drive/Ohlone Parkway in Watsonville/Pajaro is closed for asphalt paving. The closure is expected to last until July 3, ending at 5:59 a.m.
   
• Alternating lanes are closed on South Highway 1 at Grant Street in Eastside / Live Oak because of bridge work. The closure is expected to end at 6:01 a.m. tomorrow.
   
• Highway 17 at Granite Creek Road in Scotts Valley has one-way traffic because of bridge work. This closure will last until 6:01 a.m. tomorrow.
   
• Highway 9 at Cascade Avenue in San Lorenzo Valley has one-way traffic due to ongoing work. This is expected to last until 7:01 a.m. on August 31.
   
• North Highway 17 at Pasatiempo in Eastside / Live Oak is facing closures for asphalt paving. The closure is expected to end at 6:01 a.m. on June 22.
   
• East and westbound SR-152 at Freedom Blvd. in Watsonville and Pajaro is facing closures for asphalt paving. The closure will end at 5:01 a.m. today.
   
• South Highway 1 at Buena Vista Drive in Watsonville / Pajaro is facing closures for drainage work. The closure is expected to end at 3:59 p.m. today.
   
• A lane is closed on east and west SR-129 at Highway 1 in Watsonville and Pajaro for curb, gutter, and sidewalk work. The closure will end at 2:59 p.m. today.
   
• There is a lane closed on SR-129 at Salsipueda Creek Bridge in the Watsonville / Pajaro area for curb, gutter, and sidewalk work. The closure is expected to end at 2:59 p.m. today.
   
• There is a lane closure on Highway 9 between Westside and Downtown for striping work. The closure is expected to end at 3:30 p.m. on June 16.
   
• There is one-way traffic control on SR-236 at Heartwood Hill in San Lorenzo Valley because of drainage cleaning. The closure is expected to end at 1:30 p.m. on June 17.
   
• One lane on North Highway 9 in San Lorenzo Valley is closed for utility work. The closure will last until 3:01 p.m. tomorrow.
   

Long-term projects

These have been going on for a while, but are still worth keeping in mind.

• Branciforte Drive between DeLaveaga Park and Glen Canyon Road will have lane closures while county crews remove trees.
   
• On June 17, one lane of East Zayante Road between Woodwardia Ave. and West Zayante Rd in Scotts Valley will be closed from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. for tree trimming and removal of hazardous trees over the road.
   
• A single lane on Mt. Hermon Road between Lockhart Gulch Road and Covenant Lane in San Lorenzo Valley will be closed on June 16 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. while County crews trim trees and remove hazardous trees leaning over the road.
   

Disclosure: Traffic incidents are partially generated by artificial intelligence. We are constantly working to improve the accuracy and quality of our AI-generated content. However, there may still be errors or inaccuracies. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us.

The post Monday morning traffic: SR-152 closed at Freedom Blvd.; multiple lane closures appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

As Anthropic execs prepare to visit the White House after effectively being ordered to cease offering the company's Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models, the European Commission says the incident is another example of why the EU must achieve technological autonomy. Anthropic announced on Friday that the US government issued an export control directive that required the AI upstart to prevent any non-US citizens from accessing its cybersecurity models Mythos 5 and Fable 5. The order meant even some Anthropic staff could not use its models. And as there’s no way to tell if someone on the internet is a US citizen, the order effectively meant that the AI company had to stop making the models available to everyone to ensure compliance. Anthropic isn't sure why the White House issued the order. "Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or 'jailbreaking,' Fable 5," the company said. "To date, the government has only given us verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak, which essentially consists of asking the model to read a specific codebase and fix any software flaws. "Our understanding is that one potential jailbreak was shared with the government." The Wall Street Journal reports that the directive was the result of conversations held between Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and US officials, including Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, and Jassy's report of a possible jailbreak. Anthropic executives are set to meet with US officials at the White House this week to gain a fuller understanding of the developments that informed the directive, according to Axios. Whatever the Trump administration's reason for the order, Mythos and Fable remain unavailable at the time of writing. A case study for sovereignty The incident has not gone unnoticed. Thomas Regnier, spokesperson for the European Commission, said the body is still examining the directive's implications for the EU amid concerns that the US can switch off access to technology that allied partners could soon come to rely on heavily. "The Commission has taken note of Anthropic's statement regarding the US export control directive on its most advanced models and is assessing its implications, including for users in the European Union," he said. "We are seeing a new generation of highly capable AI models reach the market. These models offer significant benefits, including for cyber-defence, but they also raise serious cybersecurity concerns that need to be addressed. "This is a shared challenge, not one confined to a single jurisdiction or company. We believe that contingency measures taken in this light should not be discriminatory against partners. "This development is a further illustration of why Europe needs to strengthen its technological sovereignty, and it underlines the relevance of the cybersecurity and AI legislation already in place at EU level, including the AI Act, the Cyber Resilience Act, and the NIS2 Directive – as tools to manage exactly this kind of risk on our own terms. "We are looking closely at the practical consequences of this for European users of these services." The comments come days after the EU launched its European Technological Sovereignty Package, a slew of measures aimed at sharply reducing its reliance on technology developed by the US and China. Cybersecurity-specific AI models such as Mythos 5, Fable 5, and OpenAI's GPT-5.5 are still very early in their development, and are not yet available to many organizations, let alone casual users. The cost of dependency stays invisible until it's too late The US directive to prevent foreign nationals from accessing Anthropic's models will nevertheless prompt concerns among global partners and organizations about how a foreign government can simply revoke access to technology on which they may become highly reliant in the future. For Aled Lloyd Owen, chief of staff at Responsible AI UK, the news of Anthropic restricting access to its models only strengthens the case for the EU's plans to loosen its ties to US tech. "This is another incident that just proves the rule and proves that [the EU] must move faster and deeper, and really establish that independence as soon as possible," he told The Register. As for alternatives, Mistral AI is one of the EU's flagship AI development projects. It is widely regarded as a fast, capable, open-source model, but one that lacks the performance of "frontier" models such as those made by Anthropic and OpenAI. Owen said there is a limit to how quickly the EU can achieve autonomy, but the latest Anthropic story is "quite helpful in a lot of ways." "It's saying: 'You can't, from a commercial point of view, trust these bodies,' so to some extent, are you willing to sacrifice performance, both perceived and real, for European homegrown models that are not quite there but are certainly driving in that direction, in order to have a more reliable sovereign service? "So, the ability to shift is both technological, in terms of building effective models and building effective infrastructure, but will also involve weaning European companies from the high-capability overseas models that they're already using." Kate Hanaghan, chief research officer at TechMarketView, said: "Last week, I was talking to a couple of European integrators about exactly this issue. One framed it as 'The cost of dependency stays invisible until it's too late.' "For UK enterprises, the risk is now very clear. Depending on a single US frontier provider leaves operations exposed if that access is withdrawn. And this weekend showed it can happen without warning. Ultimately, that leaves Europe to work out what it should, and realistically can, develop for itself." Voices in the UK echo those in the EU. Kanishka Narayan, minister for AI and online safety, posted on X: "The main lesson: as we debate the future of national security and technological sovereignty, access to AI capabilities is crucial." I care about sovereign AI because it now decides our security Separately, he said: "We treat every other threat to our sovereignty with deadly seriousness, but we haven't learned to treat this one in the same way." "I care about sovereign AI because it now decides our security… it will reshape our economy faster than anything else we've seen in our lifetimes," he added. The MP went on to say: "I'm not going to pretend there's a simple switch that we can pull. There isn't. Britain needs more AI capability. This is the central political question of our time, and our first duty is to see it clearly before someone else decides the answer for us." Policy on the run The order has also angered others, for different reasons. A group of 54 security and AI experts co-signed an open letter to the US government after the directive was issued, calling on the government to lift the restrictions. They also asked the government to commit to a more transparent approach to handling AI risk assessments in the future, saying that it should be a more democratic process. Not all the signatories believe the US should have regulatory control over AI models (Anthropic believes the US rightfully holds the authority to block releases), but they said that materially impactful decisions should be grounded in science and security teams should be given time to prepare. The letter pointed out that vulnerability researchers and red teams are already relying on these models every day, and decisions to revoke access to them should be made through a democratic process, and should restrict capabilities only to the minimal extent necessary. "As a result, this action has taken the best models away from defenders, created market uncertainty, and risked America's AI leadership without any real risk to justify it," the signatories wrote. Who’s next? In its response to the White House order, Anthropic asserted the allegedly problematic features of Fable and Mythos are also present in other models, including GPT-5.5. Anthropic has stated from the launch of Fable 5 that it believes developing AI models with perfect jailbreak resistance "does not appear to be possible today," and that no one has developed a universal jailbreak for its models to the best of its knowledge. It has long advocated for and continues to stand by its defense-in-depth approach to managing risks. ®

By Sam Whitehead for KFF The Trump administration has issued final rules on how states should ensure that millions of Medicaid enrollees prove they’re working or completing other activities, such as job training, volunteering, or being enrolled in an educational program. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services released the rules on June 1. That deadline was set last year in the…

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NewCore argues the next challenge in enterprise security will be managing AI agents, not people.

President Trump was seen smiling after a UFC fighter used his post-victory interview to shout that former first lady Michelle Obama was a man—a racist right-wing conspiracy theory that has followed her since 2008.

“Fuck the speech. Aye, shoutout to Trump for having the balls to put some shit like this on,” Josh Hokit said to Joe Rogan after his second-round knockout of Derrick Lewis at Sunday’s America 250 fight night. “And if I’m gonna say anything, there’s only one person more incredible than the incredible hulk, and that’s my lord and Savior Jesus Christ.… And lastly: Michelle Obama is a man! Am I right, America?” 

“Michelle Obama is a man” shouted on the White House lawn in a ring sponsored by Bud Light only available on Larry Ellison’s Paramount Plus. What a way to celebrate America 250 and the twilight of liberal democracy. pic.twitter.com/MCTjdB3slg

— Tim Miller (@Timodc) June 15, 2026

Hokit was met with a mix of boos and cheers. Another camera showed the president, sitting ringside, reacting to the comment with a light smile. There was no public rebuke or condemnation from anyone present. 

“‘Michelle Obama is a man’ shouted on the White House lawn in a ring sponsored by Bud Light only available on Larry Ellison’s Paramount Plus,” The Bulwark’s Tim Miller posted on X. “What a way to celebrate America 250 and the twilight of liberal democracy.”

The “transvestigation” into Michelle Obama has been a yearslong effort to spite, harass, demoralize, and delegitimize this country’s first Black first lady. Given the other lies Trump has told about her husband, it’s no wonder he found the crass comment humorous.  

“With Joe Rogan smiling along,” said journalist Medhi Hasan. “(Of course I don’t need to bore you all by telling you that if this was an event hosted by a Dem president and someone said this about Laura Bush or Nancy Reagan … well … you know the rest…).” 

As always, if you find value in this work I do, please consider helping me keep it sustainable by joining my weekly newsletter, Sparky’s List! You can get it in your inbox or read it on Patreon, the content is the same. Don’t forget to visit the Tom Tomorrow Merchandise Mall, and, if you’re so inclined, follow me on Bluesky! Related | Major news outlets are ignoring Trump’s shady stock trades…

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Flatpak development has been very quiet for years. Discussions about a next-generation take are happening – and some of the signs are worrying if, like many FOSS folks, you are systemd-intolerant. In the course of researching our article on MX Linux 25.2, we came across an interesting Reddit discussion from last month, which in turn led us to a Flatpak development blog post from late last year. It looks like a team is collecting ideas for what is currently called "Flatpak-NG" – as in next generation. If this solidifies into code, this may form the basis of Flatpak version 2. The blog post isn't very informative, but the Reddit thread links to the video of a presentation from last month's Linux App Summit in Berlin, which spells things out more clearly. The Flatpak-NG idea involves handing off a lot of the isolation in Flatpak from the current bubblewrap layer to an as-yet-unwritten systemd component that the developers are currently calling systemd-appd. This would considerably simplify Flatpak, and enable it to do more isolation, including virtualizing the network stack – but at the price of making Flatpak 2 depend on systemd. A developer who was at the talk, Jorge Castro, later explained and confirmed this in a Fediverse thread. The teams behind other init systems could, of course, write their own replacement for the notional systemd-appd, but that would be a substantial amount of work. The tool that provides the new init-switching functionality in MX Linux 25.1 and 25.2, init-diversity, currently supports six other init systems besides systemd, and we've seen little sign of them cooperating to create an alternative to systemd that provides even a subset of its wider functionality. Flatpak is widely used and supported. Not all distros include it by default, but it's the only widely adopted alternative to Canonical's Snap packaging system. Snap is more versatile: it works fine with shell programs, and even the kernel can be packaged as a Snap, which is how Ubuntu Core handles it. Snap's implementation is much simpler and cleaner than Flatpak's, as is the distribution model – which, as we've reported before, is entirely open source. The only proprietary part is Canonical's Snap Store website. The trouble is, the louder advocates in the peanut gallery rarely even think about things like implementation details; they just get upset about more visible things that are easier to understand – such as who owns a website. There are other alternatives out there, such as AppImage, 0install, AppDir, and GNUstep's implementation of NeXT and Apple's .app format. We have compared these in detail before. Only two really have wide adoption, though. There's Snap, which Canonical claims has more users simply because Ubuntu has more users than all the other desktop distros put together, and there's Flatpak, which is used by every other distro with any kind of cross-distro package support. The snag is, if Flatpak 2 does arrive in a year or two, and requires systemd, then that could spell the end of Flatpak support on many systemd-free distros. That includes MX Linux, Alpine Linux, Devuan, Slackware, and many other smaller projects. For many of these, Flatpak is a lifeline: the only way to access much of the wider Linux app market. It's not so much that the Flatpak-NG team is the "A-Team," but the only team. In the original A-Team, Colonel John "Hannibal" Smith was wont to say "I love it when a plan comes together." We suspect a lot of people will not love it if this plan comes together. ®

In April, for the first time ever, an Earth observation satellite found what it was looking for, all on its own.

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

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s behemoth company that launches rockets and runs data centers, went public on Friday with a target valuation above $1.75 trillion. The move will make Musk, already the richest man in the world, vastly wealthier.

A public offering will allow SpaceX to raise even more money to fund its AI ambitions, including building more data centers, faster.

But even as Musk and other SpaceX investors see a huge windfall, the community hosting xAI data centers already in operation are demanding accountability from the company’s use of polluting gas turbines and a water-treatment facility put on pause earlier this year.

“We’re the extracted and exploited colony of what is going to be one of the most highly valued entities in the world,” says Justin Pearson, who represents portions of Memphis in the Tennessee House of Representatives. “People are going to die because of this pollution.”

“People don’t matter to SpaceX, or Anthropic, or whoever is building these data centers.”

xAI is selling $15 billion per year in compute at its Memphis campuses to Anthropic, another company planning a blockbuster IPO in the coming months. “People don’t matter to SpaceX, or Anthropic, or whoever is building these data centers,” Pearson says.

President Donald Trump has suggested the US government could take a financial stake in frontier AI companies in order to begin “giving back” to the American public. But it’s unclear what form that would take—or if such a move would even happen.

SpaceX didn’t respond to a request for comment and Anthropic declined to comment, though its head of public policy and Memphis’ mayor have touted the company’s engagement with the city.

xAI’s Colossus 1 campus in Memphis shot to national notoriety in 2024 when community members began sounding the alarm that the company was running natural gas turbines without permits. Regulators said that a loophole in the Clean Air Act allowed xAI to run what appeared to be as many as 35 turbines without a permit for a year. (Last year, local regulators granted xAI a permit to run 15 turbines on the site until 2027.)

Natural gas turbines emit microscopic particles of fine particulate matter, dubbed PM2.5, which is linked to a variety of health issues, including heart attacks, high blood pressure, and premature deaths in people with preexisting conditions. Experts warn that PM2.5 pollution can be harmful even below levels set by regulators.

xAI’s first data center was built in Boxtown, a historically Black neighborhood in Memphis that already has some of the highest asthma rates in the country from legacy industrial pollution.

“All of us who have family in South Memphis, we know somebody who has died as a result of a bronchial ailment, or a random cancer that has no place in our family tree,” says Richard Massey, a community organizer in Memphis.

A group of environmental justice groups, led by the NAACP, filed a lawsuit earlier this year against xAI, alleging that the company installed gas turbines “without an air permit or regard for the health and safety of people living nearby.” Earlier this week, residents of Southaven filed a separate class-action lawsuit against xAI and SpaceX, claiming that construction on the data center was disturbing the community.

“Everywhere [Musk] has gone, it’s been the same result…People suffer, especially in marginalized, low-income communities.”

The Environmental Protection Agency issued guidance in January that seemed to close the Clean Air Act loophole xAI was using to run its turbines without permits. However, the company had already begun setting up unpermitted turbines in Southaven, Mississippi, to power Colossus 2. As of mid-May, the company had brought in at least 46 unpermitted gas turbines to run on-site, according to emails xAI sent to regulators.

xAI has brought significant tax revenue to the region. Officials have estimated that Shelby County could net up to $28 million in property taxes from xAI’s Tennessee campus this year alone—a big injection to the county budget, which collected just over $800 million in property taxes in 2024. Last year, the city council mandated that 25 percent of xAI’s tax revenue be used to fund projects that enhance the neighborhoods where its data centers are located, including Boxtown.

Residents have been debating a list of projects, including funding for home repair and an environmental dashboard, to use the $3 million collected in 2025. That’s about .001 percent of the $250 billion that xAI was valued at when it was purchased by SpaceX in February in advance of the IPO.

But the revenue from taxes, some residents say, pales in comparison to what’s needed to offset the health impacts of the gas turbines in both Boxtown and Southaven. An initial survey released by two nonprofits earlier this week of air pollution collected from community-run air monitors at three sites throughout southwest Memphis shows that PM2.5 levels were consistently above EPA limits between November 2025 and March of this year.

A separate analysis prepared as part of the NAACP lawsuit found that if the 41 turbines listed on xAI’s permit application to power just the Colossus 2 campus ran continuously, they could possibly cause up to $44 million in health-related damage each year. (While xAI’s Memphis campus does draw some power from the local power grid, it’s not clear how often the company plans to run the gas turbines at either of its sites.)

Community members are also concerned about xAI’s water use. The Colossus 1 facility alone could require more than 5 million gallons a day to cool the computers at peak times. When xAI first came to Memphis, the company said that it would be building a water reuse facility to avoid impacting the aquifer.

xAI broke ground on the site in October. But it abruptly stopped construction in mid-April, just a few months ahead of the IPO, leaving advocates in the dark about the future of the project. “We need to focus on finishing Colossus 2 and ensuring it is extremely stable, then will build the water recycling plant,” Musk said in a tweet in early April.

Earlier this week, Memphis city attorney Tannera Gibson told the City Council in a hearing that conversations with SpaceX about the site were “pretty positive and pretty strong based on recent conversations.” Lawmakers, including some who stated that they have had similar behind-the-scenes conversations with the company, pressed for more information to be made public.

“We’ve all gotten reassurances, but I want to hear those in public for everybody else,” Memphis city council member Jerri Green said at the hearing.

Despite the outcry from the public and the multiple lawsuits it faces, SpaceX has continued adding unpermitted turbines to its data center sites. The company’s IPO revealed that it has committed more than $2.8 billion to buy gas turbines in recent months; while it called water availability a risk factor in its IPO filing documents, it made no mention of the construction of the water-treatment site. The Justice Department, meanwhile, indicated last month that it may intervene on behalf of xAI in the NAACP lawsuit.

Massey says that Musk’s track record of environmental conflicts at other sites he owns, from California to Texas to Germany, means the Memphis community is skeptical of SpaceX, despite the economic benefits the tax revenue and potential water-treatment plant could bring.

“Everywhere [Musk] has gone, it’s been the same result,” he says. “People suffer, especially in marginalized, low-income communities.”

As her older siblings prepare breakfast, 13-year-old Cynthia Perez waits at the kitchen table, not very hungry. “I’m nervous,” she tells her mom’s friend Mariana Blanco, who gently brushes the girl’s long brown hair.

“I know you are, love,” Blanco says. “It’s gonna be okay.”

It’s a March morning in Palm Beach County, Florida, and a big day for the four Perez children: They are missing school and work to testify via video in their mom’s final immigration hearing, where a judge will decide whether she’s coming home or getting deported to Guatemala.

Mariana Blanco, a Perez family friend, caregiver, and director of operations at the Guatemalan-Maya Center in Lake Worth Beach.Saul Martinez

Both their parents have been detained since last fall—their dad at Alligator Alcatraz and then a detention center in Georgia, their mom at a federal facility in Arizona. The kids, all US citizens, have been on their own for months, leaning on Blanco and each other. Fifteen-year-old Romeo Jr. is the stoic one, who dreams of becoming a surgeon. Jessica, 18, the bubbly and creative one, is considering military service after high school. Eliza, 21, is the practical one. After her parents were detained, she dropped out of college, where she’d planned to study computer science, to take over the family landscaping business and pay the rent.

I ask Cynthia about her own personality, and she flashes a grin. The “annoying” one, she tells me. Always joking and teasing her siblings. “I mean, I am the youngest, so I like to play, but now I’m just…I just don’t want to do nothing,” she adds quietly.

“She used to be a lot more talkative,” Eliza tells me. “I feel like we’re all quiet now.”

Cynthia looks uninterestedly at her waffles and strawberries. They’re in the kitchen of the Guatemalan-Maya Center, a nonprofit for immigrants that Blanco helps lead, and soon they’ll be talking with the judge and an attorney from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Blanco quizzes her: “What are you gonna say if they ask you: ‘If your mom gets deported, what are you gonna do?’”

“I’m not sure yet,” Cynthia says, taking a bite of waffle. “Because I’m not ready for a new life in a whole different country.”

Her siblings weigh the question, too—whether they’d choose to stay or go, to finish school here or be with their parents abroad. They lean toward different answers, which is scary to consider. Even this smaller family unit might not last much longer. But at least one good thing will come of this day, Blanco tells them: The unbearable uncertainty will be over. One way or the other, their mom will get out of detention.

They worry about what their parents are experiencing. “Dad says Alcatraz was really cold,” Eliza recalls. “They don’t give you sweaters, blankets. They give you one thin blanket, like a napkin.”

“And he said they were crowded in one room,” adds Jessica.

The talk turns to their mom’s Arizona accommodations. “Whether it’s here with us or over there in Guatemala,” Eliza tells her siblings, “at least she won’t be in that horrible place.”

Eliza Perez, 21, on the job in her tree-climbing harness, talks to her mom, Olga, who is calling from detention.Saul Martinez

The Perezes live in Lake Worth Beach, a coastal city about 7 miles from Mar-a-Lago and an hour from Miami. Parents Romeo Sr. and Olga arrived in the United States more than 25 years ago, having immigrated separately as teenagers—her hometown was devastated during the Guatemalan civil war, when the US-backed military massacred the indigenous Maya, including her uncle. She met Romeo, who is also Guatemalan, when she was about 17. He started a landscaping business; she cleaned homes and worked as a Mayan language translator. They raised their four kids in a small lilac-colored house with coconut palms in the front yard.

It was a good life, though the children often worried about their parents’ undocumented status. Several years ago, each family member downloaded an app that let them track one another’s whereabouts. That’s how they knew Romeo Sr. had been detained last September on his way to work—his location icon moved farther than expected, first toward Miami and then, terrifyingly, toward the Everglades. “We didn’t really have a plan,” Jessica, the second oldest, tells me, “but we had one thing: We had to keep my dad’s landscaping company going.”

Weeks later, before sunrise one day during Thanksgiving break, Olga rustled Cynthia awake. She was heading out with Eliza and Romeo Jr. to mow some lawns.

Cynthia, still tired, asked to stay home. Before she knew it, someone else was nudging her back to consciousness. “Come on, you gotta go,” Jessica told her. Cynthia, disoriented, followed her sister outside, where Blanco was waiting. They drove to the nearby house of their aunt, who is sick with cancer. (She asked that her name not be printed.) The girls wondered why they were visiting at such an early hour. When they arrived, Eliza and Romeo Jr. were ­already there, crying.

Eliza broke the news: The Florida Highway Patrol had pulled over the family truck. Olga was now in federal custody, too. ­Jessica fell to the floor, stricken by a panic attack—her mom usually calmed her during such episodes. Blanco scooped ­Cynthia into her arms. “Why is this happening to us?” the girl sobbed.

Later, Cynthia wanted to go home. But Eliza, as the eldest, felt the siblings shouldn’t stay home alone—certainly not that night. They stopped by the house just long enough to fetch clothes, toothbrushes, and other essentials. Cynthia grabbed Pusheen, a cat plushie her dad had given her. “I sprayed my mom’s perfume on it,” she tells me. Romeo Jr., Jessica, and Eliza left the bunkroom they all shared, decorated with Eliza’s manga and K-pop collections, and headed back to their aunt’s. They didn’t know for how long.

Eliza created a special ID for her mom’s incoming calls.Saul Martinez

A staggering number of parents have been swept up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. From late January 2025 through early April 2026, more than 146,000 US citizen children had moms or dads detained, the Brookings Institution estimates. That’s about 330 a day. (Based solely on DHS records, the total would be closer to 60,000, according to Brookings researcher Tara Watson, who notes that the agency has done a poor job tracking the data.)

ICE is supposed to ensure that minors aren’t left alone after an arrest. But while reporting this story, I heard about young teens fending for themselves; about a dad who begged in vain for immigration officers to let him call his babysitter; about parents stepping off deportation flights in tears because they didn’t know whether their kids were safe. These are not isolated incidents—similar stories have been documented around the country.

“We were trying to focus on people with a criminal history,” says John Sandweg, acting ICE director under President Obama. Now “the policy is: Detain everybody.”

Olga and Romeo, at least, had made a plan. Years earlier, they’d signed legal paperwork that would allow someone else to care for their children if need be, and make decisions about schooling, medical care, and travel. In addition to Olga’s sister, they designated Blanco, a dear friend and the children’s godmother.

Immigrant parents far and wide are doing the same. In Los Angeles, I spoke with an attorney who led “family preparedness” meetings during the massive ICE operation there last year—one such event, hosted by a public school district, drew almost 800 people. At a smaller gathering I attended in San Francisco, organizers encouraged parents to keep their kids’ schools in the loop as to which adults might step in as temporary guardians and cautioned them to maintain good records of key information like their children’s medications and allergies. Last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill that makes it easier for immigrant parents to designate alternate caregivers.

In the Chicago area, I spoke with a substitute teacher who’d immediately said yes when an undocumented friend asked her to sign paperwork for her sons. Over the past two decades, Florida activist Nora ­Sandigo, a US citizen from Nicaragua, has become a temporary guardian to hundreds of children through a nonprofit she runs for this purpose. “Sometimes children are scared and confused, and it’s a daily job to explain what is happening, why their parents had to leave, that they are safe and cared for,” she says. A few kids have lived with her, but most stay with their relatives; it’s her responsibility to keep them in school, schedule their doctors’ appointments, and help them travel abroad to visit their parents—or join them if desired.

Blanco, a naturalized citizen with a toddler of her own, is 33 years old. She was born in Mexico City and came to South Florida when she was 7. After college she did social work in the ­favelas of Brazil, and then moved to Chicago, where she landed a job with the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement. She eventually made her way back to South Florida. That’s where she met Olga Perez, who translated for the Guatemalan-Maya Center.

Olga’s kids struggled to cope in the days after her arrest. Romeo Jr. became quieter, not wanting to talk with friends about the family crisis. Jessica couldn’t sleep, and when their mom was ­transferred from Florida to Arizona, she had another panic episode that turned into an asthma attack; she fainted and had to go to the hospital. “It’s really hard to lose a parent,” she tells me.

The kids stayed with their aunt off and on for a while, but they missed their own beds and soon moved back home. Blanco continued to invite them over to her place regularly to spend the night or just to hang out and play with her baby, who helped take their mind off things. She brought them to the movies and the beach, cooked them dinner, and got them ice cream. She’s “a great hugger,” the girls tell me. She’s “always been there for us,” Jessica adds.

“They travel as a family unit,” Blanco says of the kids. “They don’t do anything without the siblings.”

But there were missed milestones: Romeo Jr. was devastated that his mom and dad couldn’t teach him to drive after he got his permit. “I had to tell them over the phone” about the permit, he recalls, “which is hard: It’s a big accomplishment for me, but they’re not there to support me.” They also weren’t around to see ­Jessica off to the JROTC ball or to take her to tour colleges with marine biology ­programs, which she wants to pursue if she doesn’t enlist. Eliza especially missed her parents at her “golden” 21st birthday—February 21. She had wanted a big celebration because she’d never gotten a quinceañera.

Their dad would try to call every morning and remind them to eat breakfast, but “it’s not the same as in person,” Romeo Jr. told me. For Eliza’s birthday, he managed a video call, which felt special, and Olga called in from Arizona, where she’d convened a group of detained women to sing “Happy Birthday” over the phone.

Romeo Jr. holds a rosary during mass.Saul Martinez

Before 1996, undocumented parents with American children could avoid deportation if they had lived in the country at least seven years and hadn’t committed any crimes. Then, amid a surge of immigration, some lawmakers railed about “anchor babies” giving “amnesty” to their “illegal” parents and Congress passed tougher ­requirements. President Bill Clinton signed the changes into law and ICE began deporting more moms and dads, leaving behind “immigration orphans.”

In subsequent years, the Bush and Obama administrations, too, separated citizen children from immigrant parents. There were millions of mixed-status families, and between 2010 and 2012 the federal government issued more than 200,000 removal orders for parents with US-born children. Research showed, not surprisingly, that these deportations harmed kids’ health and drove thousands into foster care, so Obama’s DHS moved to create some guardrails.

In 2013, Tom Homan, then a top ICE ­official, introduced the Parental Interests Directive, a set of guidelines that would help agents enforce the law without hampering parents’ rights. The next year, on primetime television, Obama announced Deferred Action for Parents of Americans—a sort of sister policy to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the one that temporarily protected people from deportation if they were brought to the United States as children. DAPA would similarly shield parents from deportation if they had citizen kids. “Unless for significant public safety or national security concerns, we wanted to ensure that we’re never separating families,” John Sandweg, then the acting ICE director, told me. “We were trying to focus on people with a criminal history.”

Within days, Texas and 25 other states with Republican governors sued to stop the program, arguing that it violated the Constitution and federal statutes. The case made it to the Supreme Court, which split 4–4. (This was soon after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, when Republicans refused to confirm Obama’s pick for a replacement.) DAPA never went into effect, in any case, and the Trump administration officially rescinded it in 2017.

“If you manage to say, ‘I have children,’ you’re only there for 12 hours before you’re transferred to another facility, and you have to try to find someone who can listen.”

Homan became acting director of ICE that year. Though he’d introduced the Parental Interests Directive under Obama, he’d long wanted to separate families at the border, a punishment he thought would deter others from coming. Trump adviser Stephen Miller embraced the idea; the resulting “zero tolerance” policy instructed Border Patrol officers to rip kids from their parents’ arms if necessary. It would take years for families to be reunited—some never were. “It was an atrocity,” says Kelly Albinak Kribs, an ­attorney at the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights. “Parents had no idea where their kids were sent.”

Outrage over the policy was widespread, and a federal court struck it down in 2018. But family separations didn’t end, even under President Joe Biden. The focus and the targets just shifted. More often than not, the Trump administration is now going after families who have lived in the nation’s interior for years, nearly half of whom have kids who are American born and raised. ICE has detained parents of citizen children at twice the rate it did under Biden, and is deporting ­mothers at four times the rate, according to a ProPublica analysis. The vast majority of the parents being removed have no serious criminal record. “The policy is: Detain everybody,” says Sandweg, the Obama-era ICE director.

Crucially, the Trump administration has created its own version of the ­Parental Interests Directive. It’s called the Detained Parents Directive, and as the name change implies, it scraps the Biden-era language about incarcerating parents only in “limited circumstances” and treating them humanely.

Some rules remain, but ICE seems to be ignoring them. For instance, parents are meant to be detained close to where their children live, but moms like Olga Perez are regularly transferred across the country—one study found a twelvefold increase in transfers of noncriminal Latino detainees far from home. It’s all in line with the administration’s eagerness for immigrants to self-deport. “Shuffle flights”—moving a person from one facility to the next in quick succession—are also common and make it harder for detainees to meet with attorneys or make arrangements for their families. “Imagine that you were transferred to four or five different facilities” in as many days, says Zain Lakhani of the Women’s Refugee Commission. “Even if you manage to say, ‘I have children,’ you’re only there for 12 hours before you’re transferred to another facility, and you have to try to find someone who can listen.”

The result: kids left in precarious circumstances. The Guatemalan-Maya Center recently learned of a 13-year-old Florida boy whose parents are in federal custody—he’d been living alone for months. In another case, a middle-school girl moved in with her neighbors after her mom was arrested. Then, after the neighbors’ dad was detained, the girl went to stay with her stepbrother, who had adult male roommates and was gone a week at a time for work. “This kid was by herself,” Blanco says.

“Parents are supposed to have an opportunity to set up an alternate caregiver,” says Rachel Prandini, an attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in California. But ICE officers “are not following their own policies.”

“There’s such utter lawlessness,” adds Heather Perez Arroyo, an immigration attorney in Massachusetts who defends detained parents.

Eliza’s dad’s landscaping truck has AC/DC and Metallica stickers on the ceiling, Nirvana on the dash. “He loved rock,” she says. I’m struck by her use of the past tense.

Yet another big change under Trump: Previously, deported parents could decide whether they wanted their kids to join them abroad, and ICE was supposed to facilitate that choice. Now, ICE says it will do so only if “operationally feasible.” Last fall, when observers from the Women’s Refugee Commission and another nonprofit, Physicians for Human Rights, visited Honduras, they met newly deported parents who were inconsolable because they didn’t know where their kids were. “The majority were never asked if they had children at the time they were arrested,” WRC’s Lakhani says. “Even when parents were begging, ‘My children are home alone,’ they were not given opportunities to make arrangements.”

Reuniting families post-deportation can be a logistical nightmare. American kids can’t travel abroad without a passport, and getting one requires both parents’ signatures. “If your child is in the care of your undocumented sister, she can’t get your child a passport,” Lakhani says. And “she can’t get on a plane and fly your child to Honduras—she doesn’t have a [US] passport” either.

The federal government doesn’t bother to track the fates of children whose parents were removed by ICE. Four of the deported women the nonprofit groups interviewed in ­Honduras were mothers of newborns. All of them had their infants taken away.

Artwork at the Guatemalan Maya Center.Saul Martinez

The sun hasn’t yet risen when I arrive at the Perez family’s home on a spring morning. A rooster crows. It’s a school day and the children are inside getting ready. By now, Romeo Sr. and Olga have been detained for a few months, and although the kids spend the occasional night with their aunt or Blanco, they prefer to be back at home, surrounded by their things and relying on each other.

Around 7:30 a.m., Romeo Jr. comes out to start their black pickup truck, which has a trailer for the landscaping equipment. Then he climbs into the back seat, leaving the front open for Eliza, who will drive him and Jessica to Lake Worth High. (A friend comes for Cynthia later.) As Eliza navigates down A Street toward the school, she multitasks, handing Jessica a pink notebook and asking her to put the address for the day’s first landscaping job into the phone’s GPS.

“Homeland Security was saying that my mom is not important,” Eliza says, and that “we can manage by ourselves. No, we can’t!”

Eliza turns to me and explains that this is her dad’s truck. There are AC/DC and Metallica stickers on the ceiling, Nirvana on the dash. “He loved rock,” she says. I’m struck by her use of the past tense. She asks Romeo Jr. about one of his after-school clubs and then drops off her siblings before heading out to pick up a female landscaping worker, who hops in the back seat.

Eliza’s life was turned upside down by her parents’ arrests. She’d been doing her prerequisites at Palm Beach State College and hoping to work in tech, but had to drop out to save the business. She taught herself to drive the big truck and trailer and is proud of what she’s accomplished. “Not everyone can do this—step up and do landscaping work in the hot sun, learn how to run these machines. It’s not very common for girls, especially my age,” she tells me. “I really am trying for my family.”

The job is in another city, and traffic is slow. We pass a billboard with Trump’s face on it—Eliza grouses about the road closures whenever he comes to Mar-a-Lago. She coughs; she’s been sick but didn’t want to miss a day of work, especially when her worker already made childcare arrangements. As we drive, the women chat about Olga’s case. DHS is arguing that the Perez kids don’t need their mother, Eliza explains, and that they’re getting by just fine without her. The agency’s attorney tried to stop Eliza from testifying, asserting that because she’s 21, an adult, she isn’t affected by the separation. “Homeland Security was saying that my mom is not important,” she says, and “we can manage by ourselves. No, we can’t! I feel like quitting. I don’t feel like this is my gig, my dream.”

Eliza sighs. “I would rather work in an office or do something else, something for myself,” she says as the truck creeps forward. The one bright spot is how much closer she’s grown to her siblings. Each has adopted a role: “Romeo is like my secretary—he helps me deposit checks, messages the customers. He still doesn’t know how to pay the bills, but he helps me keep money in the accounts.” ­Jessica takes care of Cynthia, who is still young enough that she shared a bedroom with her parents before they were detained. “I never slept alone. Like, I’m scared of the dark,” she told me. Now Cynthia has the top bunk in the bunkroom, and Romeo Jr. has moved into their parents’ room.

The younger siblings recognize ­Eliza’s sacrifices. “She’s really trying to work hard so we can buy the stuff we want, like clothes, school supplies, food,” says Jessica. She likens her sister to “a second mother” who “wants us to be happy, even though she isn’t.”

“She has a lot of pressure on top of her,” Olga told me over the phone from her detention facility.

When Eliza was younger, her dad would sometimes bring her along to help with his weekend work, but she mostly stayed in the truck. “He always was like, ‘You guys are gonna go to school or find a better job,’” Eliza recalls.

So much for that. “I’ve gotten a bit of muscles,” she says as we park near the first job site, a home in a quiet neighborhood with big yards with sprinklers. She pulls on her Converses, pops a cough drop, unloads a mower, and gets to work.

From left, Cynthia, Jessica, Eliza, and Romeo Jr. look through family photos outside St. Luke’s in Palm Springs.Saul Martinez

On the morning of Olga’s hearing, we’re back in the Guatemalan-Maya Center’s kitchen. Cynthia’s hair is brushed and braided, but she hasn’t eaten much. Today will be her first time testifying before a judge, though not the first time they’ve gathered for a hearing. Her mom’s case started weeks ago, and they’ve taken several days off school to prepare. Jessica testified last week, as did Eliza, who convinced the judge she deserved to speak despite being 21. Romeo Jr., in dress pants with a thick watch, is preparing to give his own statement. “I want to be a doctor; how am I gonna be a doctor in Guatemala?” one of Blanco’s colleagues coaches him.

Father Frank O’Loughlin, an elderly priest who founded the center decades ago, arrives with teacher Maria de la Guardia. She takes Cynthia’s face tenderly in her hands. “Nothing you say or do will doom your mom,” she tells the girl quietly. “If MAGA wins today, MAGA wins. Hopefully she’s released. But Cynthia, if she’s not, nothing you said or did will make the difference.”

Cynthia tries not to cry.

“If your mom gets deported, we will go visit her,” de la Guardia says.

“I’ve never thought of doing this ever in my life,” Cynthia tells me. “But I guess today’s the date. I’m really nervous and scared.”

Soon, Blanco calls on Cynthia to pray. She sits on a couch next to Jessica and Romeo Jr., who holds his head in his hands. They close their eyes and repeat a prayer after Father Frank. “I want to say thank you to all of you guys,” Eliza says afterward, standing with the priest.

“I hope my mom does get out,” Jessica says. They’ve all heard what things are like at her facility: the awful food and filthy water, the neglectful medical care. Olga has diabetes, and at one point she had to be hospitalized—they handcuffed her to her bed. (“Everybody knows you’re a criminal,” she recalled a guard saying.)

Some Perez family photos.Saul Martinez

“But if she doesn’t, you know, wherever she is, I hope she’s safe,” Jessica continues, her voice shaky with emotion. “And I just want to thank all of you guys for praying for my dad, too. If I can’t have one parent, I hope to have the other.” She rubs a red rosary in her hands, wipes away a tear.

“Let’s hope you have both, baby,” Blanco says.

At 11:30 a.m., when the hearing is due to start, the children go into a room by themselves with a laptop that will let them talk with the judge. They sit in a row. Cynthia squeezes a green stress toy, and after a few minutes, they pray the rosary aloud. Then they sign the cross and lean forward to rest their elbows on the table and wait.

Minutes pass. Then Blanco comes in with bad news. The hearing has been postponed another week. The children drop their heads. It’s been postponed four times already. One time, the kids sat in front of the computer for hours before the judge notified them. “Another day of work wasted,” Eliza says.

“I love my siblings a lot, but I love my mom a lot more. I told them, ‘You guys need to have a plan; I won’t be here to take care of you.’”

“Another day of school wasted,” Romeo Jr. adds. Jessica begins to cry.

“It’s so disrespectful,” Blanco tells me. “The anxiety leading up to one of the biggest days of your life—and having to do that over and over again, it’s torture. The lack of regard for people in the system is shocking.”

They’d transported Olga for the hearing, and then turned right around and brought her back to detention. “It almost seems,” Blanco says, “like they are trying to wear you out, so you say, ‘Screw this, I’m done with it.’”

Eliza blames herself. She was the one driving when her mom was arrested. The state trooper got behind them, ran their plate, and linked it to her dad, who’d already been detained. “If I would have never gone out that day to work, or if I would have taken a different route…” she laments.

The kids gather again in Blanco’s office. The phone rings—it’s Olga. She’s crying. I can’t do this anymore, she says in Spanish. Cynthia and Eliza cry, too. Blanco kneels on the floor next to them, her hands on their knees. Romeo Jr. squeezes the green stress toy. Jessica tries to rally the troops. “One more week, I promise you, Mami!” she says. She turns to Romeo Jr. “We’re strong,” she adds. They fist-bump.

A week later, the kids will take off from school and work again. They will wait in front of the computer, and the hearing will be postponed—again—a bad dream that won’t end. The siblings know that after everything they’ve been through, despite how close they’ve become, when this nightmare is finally over they may have to say goodbye to each other, too.

“I want to be with my mom,” Cynthia tells me, “but I’m not sure I would move over there. I want to be a veterinarian, and I think the education is not like that over there—like, my grandmas live in the mountains. It’s gonna be so different.”

Jessica, too, is unsure. Romeo Jr. says he wants to stay in the United States for med school so he can become a surgeon.

Eliza, ever the practical one, is thinking she’ll move to Guatemala. “I love my siblings a lot, but I love my mom a lot more,” she’d said during our drive. “I told them, ‘You guys need to have a plan; I won’t be here to take care of you.’”

It’s hard to imagine being separated, and with Olga on the phone they try not to. Jessica sees Cynthia crying and goes to hug her, tells her a joke to cheer her up. She puts an arm around Eliza and grabs Romeo Jr., too. The siblings huddle together and Jessica starts singing. They laugh a little through their tears, trying to forget everything that’s wrong and remind each other what they still have.

Within a few months, both their mom and their dad will be ordered back to Guatemala.

Britain's AI jobs boom is creating a two-track labor market, according to PwC, which just so happens to make a healthy living helping companies navigate AI-driven transformation. The consulting giant's latest AI Jobs Barometer found hiring for AI specialists in the UK jumped 61 percent over the past year, rising from 112,000 roles in 2024 to 180,000 in 2025, even as overall job vacancies across the economy fell by 6.6 percent. That headline figure is the sort of thing consultancies put in press releases, but the more interesting bit comes later. PwC's analysis suggests employers aren't rushing to hire hordes of machine learning engineers and model builders. Instead, they're increasingly looking for people who can use AI inside existing professions and business functions. The firm found that so-called AI user roles grew by almost 66,000 positions during the year, while AI developer roles increased by just 2,600. After years of declaring that AI will revolutionize everything from accounting to sandwich-making, companies appear to have reached the awkward stage where somebody actually must make the technology useful. PwC argues the result is a "two-track" labor market. Jobs where AI helps skilled workers automate repetitive tasks and focus on higher-value work are growing faster than roles where the technology mainly makes tasks easier and lowers barriers to entry. According to the report, roles most enhanced by AI have grown by 39 percent since 2018, compared with 17 percent growth in jobs where AI is primarily simplifying work. The firm’s wage data tells a similar story. Jobs requiring AI skills now command an average wage premium of 34.2 percent, up from 11 percent a year ago. Consumer market companies are offering premiums as high as 64 percent, while government and public sector employers top out at 12 percent. That's certainly good news for workers with AI skills. It's also not the sort of conclusion likely to upset a firm that advises clients on AI strategy for a living. The findings land against a backdrop of growing anxiety about AI's impact on employment. Recent polling found one in five Britons believes AI-driven layoffs could eventually trigger civil unrest, while another survey found that office workers are already spending nearly six hours every week checking, correcting, or redoing work generated by AI tools. For all the excitement around AI, the hiring surge appears to be concentrated in a surprisingly old-fashioned category: people who know what they're doing. ®

Santa Cruz Metro advocates are continuing their push for signatures to get a sales tax ballot measure before county voters in order to secure a local funding source to maintain Metro’s major service increases over the past three years. One program in jeopardy without local funding is Youth Cruz Free, offering free rides to K-12 students, which has shown to be a success among local students and their families.

His Majesty's Treasury (HMT) is looking for a new chief technology officer, offering an annual salary of up to £77,000 – less than some elite graduates might expect in their first job at a tech vendor. HMT promises "an exciting opportunity to influence decision making that affects the whole of the UK." The successful candidate also gets a generous civil service pension, with an employer contribution of nearly 30 percent. The salary range is from £69,820 to £77,000 for a role that can be based in London, Darlington (North East England), or Norwich (East Anglia). "HMT is a fast‑paced, policy‑driven organisation with a diverse user base of several thousand staff, including ministers, senior officials and analysts, all reliant on secure, resilient and responsive digital services," the job ad says. The role offers "a unique opportunity to work at the centre of government, operating at pace, influencing major decisions, and ensuring technology effectively supports ministers and the Treasury's critical role in stewarding the UK economy." These are the kinds of users less forgiving of tech problems, as they are responsible for controlling public spending, directing the UK's economic policy, and achieving sustainable economic growth at a time when the public expects both good services and low taxes. The incoming CTO will do all this with a "predominantly Microsoft‑based technology ecosystem, including Microsoft 365, Azure and associated security and endpoint tooling, delivered through a largely outsourced, multi‑tower operating model." Leading technical staff and dealing with multiple strategic suppliers, the lucky individual is expected to define technology strategy, standards, and architecture, all while giving taxpayers value for money. Weighty expectations also come with the people side of the job, since the CTO needs to be "a trusted technical adviser to enable informed decisions" both inside HMT and across other Whitehall departments. This being 2026, the job ad mentions AI as one of the technologies the role is expected to champion. What the ad does not mention is another looming headache: HMT must decide by December whether to move its finance and HR systems from Oracle Fusion to Workday, or stick with Oracle and diverge from the government's overarching £1.7 billion shared services strategy – which HMT signed off. No pressure, then. ®

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 15 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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

Donald Trump just exploded in fury at Jamie Raskin, calling for him to be expelled from Congress. Trump raged that if Democrats win the House, Raskin will lead the president’s impeachment. In saying this, Trump is accidentally admitting that he cares very much about the prospect of another impeachment. In fact, he’s meanwhile reportedly trying to get Republicans to expunge his two past impeachments, indicating how much they eat away at him.

All this hands Democrats a weapon. They should say, Mr. President, if we win the House, we absolutely will hold you accountable. And that raises a question: What can a Democratic House really do to hold Trump accountable, anyway? What should it look like?

We’re talking about all of it with Andy Craig, a senior editor at The UnPopulist, who often thinks creatively on this topic. Andy, good to have you on.

Andy Craig: Good to be with you, Greg.

Sargent: So let’s start with Trump’s explosion at Congressman Jamie Raskin. It kind of came out of nowhere. He posted this:

“Jamie Raskin, a Loser in Life, who worked endlessly during my First Term to impeach me, will guaranteed be trying to do it again despite one of the most successful Presidencies in history.”

Trump then continues:

“EXPEL THE BUM. Congress can never be great with people like this who suffer massively from Trump Derangement Syndrome, casting their vote of HATE!”

Andy, there’s a lot more of that. What’s your reaction?

Craig: Well, it does show that it’s certainly one of his fixations, that he is thinking already about what will happen in the next Congress. He’s not wrong that it’s very likely he will face another impeachment trial. Even though we’ve seen some reluctance from Hakeem Jeffries and from some Democrats to do another impeachment, the pressure will be too much, because the outrages are just too many and will continue to pile on. And this is one of the tools Congress has, and it does have an effect even if you don’t get to 67 votes in the Senate.

Sargent: Exactly. The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump and his allies are hatching a plan to get GOP lawmakers to vote on a resolution that somehow voids Trump’s impeachments, whatever the hell they think they mean by that. Trump said this to the Journal: “It should be done because I did nothing wrong.” So he’s saying on the record that he thinks his impeachments should be expunged.

But here’s the real kicker. Several GOP lawmakers tell the Journal that such a thing would have a tough time passing. Which means some Republicans in the House don’t want to vote to expunge Trump’s impeachments.

Craig: One of the more normal aspects of this midterm is that they’re always a referendum on the president, and this president is deeply underwater on his approval ratings. So they’re making their political calculus—the last thing they want to do is be dredging up January 6, on which he is still particularly unpopular, or going down that route, or just generally having to be more associated with him.

They want to be on the attack blasting Democrats for whatever they’re going to do. They don’t want to be defending Trump right now, given where the polls are at.

Sargent: So in a way, that’s why Trump’s explosion of fury at Raskin actually reveals weakness and hands Democrats a weapon for the midterms. It’s really a self-own. He’s admitting that he doesn’t want a Democratic House because he will face accountability. So Democrats can say, Trump is plainly afraid of a Democratic House because it will hold him accountable—he’s admitting it himself.

And, Andy, Democrats should say that. Even some Republicans don’t want to vote to protect Trump. And I guarantee you, independents who are already tilting overwhelmingly against Trump right now and hate corruption really want a check on Trump and really want him held accountable. What do you think?

Craig: Right. Well, that’s the campaign strategy decision for Democrats to make in terms of what’s going to maximize their chances in November. But on the merits, the fact is that the shyness away from talk of impeachment isn’t well justified. The polling numbers show it’s not unpopular. It’s not toxic. It’s not something independents and swing voters repel from.

We see a lot of sentiment, understandably, across the board, that people want more elite accountability. The idea that he should get off the hook—whether it’s Trump or whether it’s anybody else, people caught up in the Epstein files—there’s a mood in the air of that kind of thing, where Trump is not immune from this kind of backlash against the sense of elite impunity.

Sargent: I agree 100 percent. So let’s talk about what a Democratic House can actually do. Let’s put aside impeachment for now, although I do think Dems should impeach Trump and many of his top officials.

If you look at oversight and investigations, a quick list would mean much more digging into the Epstein files, serious investigations into how Attorney General Todd Blanche is deciding to prosecute Trump’s critics and how Blanche oversaw the bogus settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS—which granted Trump IRS immunity—[and] serious investigations into the Trump family’s crypto scams and their dealings abroad. That’s just a start. What do you want to see happen on the investigations front?

Craig: Well, the endless litany of outrages in the second term has been so much more extreme in terms of it being a target-rich environment for things to go after. Certainly one thing I’m particularly interested in is the boat strikes campaign. The, frankly, murder that’s going on with that—the commander of Southern Command essentially resigned in protest over this.

I think there’s real digging that needs to be done there with Hegseth and what’s been going on in the military in terms of rationalizing how this is somehow legal, which it obviously isn’t.

Sargent: Andy, let me just jump in and say about that—you could subpoena Pete Hegseth. You could subpoena top defense officials. You could subpoena the ones who are resigning under protest—there’s at least one of them. You could bring them into Congress and question them all under oath. We’re learning every day in dribs and drabs new things about this campaign of murder on the high seas, basically.

And it looks to me like if you were to be able to just dig even a little bit, you’d find an extraordinary lack of any real rationale at the core of this. You might even just find summary executions being carried out just because Trump says, Blow it up. Basically something as really disgusting as that.

Craig: That really gets to the important nuts-and-bolts problem of subpoenas and enforcing them and making them work. This is something Josh Chafetz has written about that I highly recommend people look into. For years now—and we saw this in the first term—congressional subpoenas have tried to be enforced through civil litigation, going to the courts and asking a federal district judge, Will you please make this person show up because Congress subpoenaed them?

That’s not how it should work. Congress is not dependent on the other branches, nor on the other mechanism, which is referral to the Department of Justice for prosecution, which is obviously a dead end also.

Congress really needs to lean into using other tools they have, including its inherent contempt power, where ultimately Congress can arrest somebody on its own say-so, and it’s been done before. Congress can impose financial penalties. Congress can also attach funding fights to this—we won’t fund Pete Hegseth’s own office staff, potentially, or the Executive Office of the President, the White House staff.

There are all kinds of tools that they need to use. But the problem with the litigation is it just drags on for years and years. Even if Congress ultimately wins, it never gets done before there’s been a new presidential election and a new administration comes in.

Sargent: I just want to break up what you said there into two parts and explore each one, because they’re important. The first one is, how do you get a rogue administration to obey subpoenas? You’re essentially saying Congress has got to maximize its own tools to do that. That’s especially true given that this would be up to this administration, up to Todd Blanche—essentially his Department of Justice—to decide whether to enforce subpoenas.

So you have to have Congress exercise something like an imperial power itself and really maximize what it can do to force these subpoenas to be honored, right?

Craig: Absolutely. Congress needs to remember that they are their own branch of government. They have coequal—as it’s often put—powers. When Congress issues a subpoena to somebody, that doesn’t depend on the president agreeing. It doesn’t depend on a court agreeing. That is a binding order that has legal force.

And ultimately, they need to go after people’s bank accounts or even send the sergeant at arms out to haul in, potentially. Along with the other procedural tools they have, like potentially defunding people who aren’t complying with subpoenas.

Sargent: That was the second thing you brought up, which is the act of defunding. I want to try to get at that a little bit more. You’re talking about Congress essentially really using as a hammer the ability to just essentially zap an office. In other words, Congress could essentially say—either to enforce a subpoena or for some other purpose—We’re not funding the White House personnel, we’re not funding this agency, we’re not funding that agency until you do A, B, and C. Correct?

Craig: Absolutely. This goes back to the deep fundamentals of our constitutional system in the English parliaments of the Middle Ages. The power of the purse is the ultimate power. That’s why it’s vested in the legislature. So there are different ways you can structure it and procedurally how you tackle it.

But if nothing else, these appropriations come up every year. They elapse. And Congress can attach conditions saying, if the secretary of defense—and that’s the title to use for him—is refusing to comply with a subpoena, or the White House chief of staff or whatever, then we’re just not going to pay their salary. We’re going to defund their staff. Or there are other tools—you can defund various programs. You have to be willing to kind of take hostages. This ain’t beanbag.

Sargent: A hundred percent. And so let me ask you this. Let’s say the corrupt prosecutions of Trump’s critics really went even further. They’re already absolutely lawless and terrible. But let’s say it kept going. You could theoretically see a Democratic Congress essentially saying, We’re not funding that U.S. attorney’s office anymore. Isn’t that a valid tool?

Craig: Absolutely. That’s what it’s there for. We’re not going to have King Charles I ruling without Parliament and funding his own prosecution of critics and that kind of thing. There are some appropriations where there are fights you’ll have to have about trying to claw it back because they’re standing appropriations, they automatically renew, that kind of thing.

But most things, including exactly that—the U.S. attorney’s office that’s going after somebody, or anything like that, the whole DOJ—those are on the annual appropriations. They will expire if Congress doesn’t get its act together and pass something.

Sargent: I want to hone in on your big point enmeshed in all that, which is basically that this sort of act would, if in a sustained way carried out, be a way of restoring integrity to our constitutional system. It’s worth pointing out that Trump’s abuses are heavily, heavily dependent on Congress utterly checking out of the business of oversight and lawmaking and everything, really.

Republicans have neutered themselves, neutered the Congress. That is part of the reason we’ve got this unchecked lawless presidency running rampage everywhere.

If we did what you’re talking about, you’d really be restoring balance to the system in a fundamental way. It wouldn’t be that Congress is overreaching. It would be Congress is bringing balance back to the system. Can you talk about that?

Craig: Yes. This is the core Madisonian checks and balances. These are the powers Congress is supposed to have. Like so many things, this problem predates Trump. The imperial presidency has been gaining power and Congress has been becoming more dysfunctional and more passive and not being as assertive as it should be going back decades. But as with so many other things we see, this is Trump coming in and turning it up to 11.

We’ve created a presidency that is this kind of turnkey tyranny, where it can outrun what even the courts can keep up with. But on a fundamental level, the big-picture political accountability for a lawless executive branch can only come from Congress.

Sargent: OK, so let’s just imagine that Democrats win one or both chambers of Congress. It’s most likely that they’ll win the House and not the Senate, but it is possible that they’ll win both—or it’s possible that they’ll win neither, but they probably will win one or both.

So what happens if they do something approaching your vision of this? Do we really just see this fundamental shift in how the government is essentially functioning? What would it look like in a day-to-day, week-to-week way? What would the American people be seeing?

Craig: Well, there are historical precedents, and the biggest one would be what happened when Andrew Johnson was president after Lincoln during Reconstruction. And Congress was able to act more aggressively because they had Republican supermajorities—the South was unrepresented.

What you can do with simple majorities can sometimes be more modest. But even then, what they essentially did is Congress took over reining in the government. It passed laws instructing the Cabinet secretaries what to do. It passed laws against Johnson firing them, which is what got him impeached and within one vote of getting removed from office.

We’re not going to have a parliamentary system—it’s not going to look like the United Kingdom where the executive merges into the legislature. We do have an independently elected president. There are certain constitutional powers that the president has.

But Congress is the preeminent branch. Congress is the voice of the people. The president is not the sovereign tribune of the American people. Our elected representatives are the ones who have those powers. They can pass laws and use their various tools to pretty directly reduce, in some ways at least, the presidency to a much more constrained role, where there are legal guardrails on what the executive branch agencies, the Cabinet departments, the secretaries, the heads of these agencies are obligated to do. And to craft that in ways that it’s enforceable, both through the courts and by Congress following up with oversight.

Sargent: It would really be something else if Democrats would actually go through with that. Of course, for a whole bunch of reasons, they might not, or they might adopt something in between. That’s a topic for another pod.

But just to close out here, when Donald Trump explodes in fury because he might be held accountable by a Democratic Congress, it makes me wonder—why don’t Democrats right now go out there and talk the way you’re talking? Maybe not exactly saying that this will be an imperial Congress, but saying something along the lines of, This is an absolutely out-of-control chief executive and that is having an enormously damaging effect in this country and the whole world. And if you put us in charge of Congress, we will rebalance. We will hold this guy accountable. We’ll put guardrails on him. We’ll restore balance and sanity to this system. They should get their heads to this place and talk that way, right?

Craig: Yes.… You can have the political strategy arguments about how many votes will this get and what the polls say. There’s pretty solid evidence that this is a winning message. But also what it does is it amounts to a kind of precommitment. It shows that if and when they win, that this is the public mandate they have.

When you’re talking about impeachment in particular, even if you cannot get to a major supermajority in the Senate to convict, it’s a kind of censure with teeth. Do you want to be out there hammering these issues, exposing the wrongdoing, creating the historical record, and showing that you’re doing what you can?

Or are you going to just kind of roll over with a defeatist, Well, he’s not going to get removed from office anyway, so what’s the point? I think that’s entirely the wrong attitude, and it’s learning the wrong lessons from what happened in the last two impeachments.

Sargent: I could not agree more. Andy Craig, I really hope Democrats are listening to you on this. Anyway, folks, if you enjoyed this, check out Andy’s work over at The UnPopulist. He thinks about this stuff very creatively, very frequently. Andy, thanks so much for coming on.

Craig: Thanks.

Hunter Biden is back, seven years drug-free, and spoiling for social media fights. He’s won kudos for his (only slightly creaky) clapbacks to his haters. “Hunter went from smoking crack to smoking MAGAs,” observed one fan last week. Last seen advising his father to defy common sense by staying in the 2024 presidential race, Hunter is today owning his crackhead days and flexing his recovery from addiction. He’s even launched a kind of secular ministry with the hope, he says, of “giving people the space to talk about what they’re going through” and helping them see “the incredible promises they can receive if they stay the course” of recovery.

What’s novel about this coming-out is not that Biden, who has been through the wringer, now abstains from alcohol and drugs. Teetotaling in public life is extremely common. Instead, the surprise is that he’s expressing a moral ideal we haven’t seen in U.S. politics in a long, long time: a form of sobriety that is much more appealing than mere abstinence from drugs and alcohol.

Alcoholics Anonymous, which Biden has participated in, sees sobriety as a kind of sacred condition, one contingent on much more than a person’s blood alcohol content. Sobriety requires a daily commitment to a set of moral and spiritual precepts, including honesty, humility, accountability, solidarity, and service.

By contrast, a “dry drunk,” in A.A.’s terms, is an alcoholic who doesn’t drink but hasn’t undergone the wholesale psychic change that is both the price and the dividend of A.A.

The logic adds up. Dry drunks must manfully resist the temptation to drink, and thus often feel deprived, like a person on a highly restrictive diet. You can think of a dry drunk as always hangry, always stuck in traffic without A.C., always quietly fuming about what the world has denied him—from career success to a hit of the crack pipe to the adulation of the whole world. Out of this sense of deprivation, dry drunks variously retreat into self-loathing, approach others with fear, or lash out in anger.

We’ve had 18 years of dry drunks in the White House, with a reprieve only with Obama, who drank in moderation. With George W. Bush, Joe Biden, and now Donald Trump, none of whom touched a drop as president, it might be that dry drunkery, in which suppressed demons come out sideways, has become the ranking paradigm of moral character. For most of this century, then, Americans have not seen a president with a temperament worth aspiring to.

George W. Bush drank heavily for decades and gave it up when he was born again at 40. Fine. But as president, he was given to saber-rattling and warmongering that many in A.A. consider to be at steep odds with Twelve Step sobriety. Likewise, Joe Biden, who abstained, citing family history, could often be what my sober friend Beau Friedlander calls a “crispy critter”—prone to defensiveness and snippiness. Unwisely deciding to stay in the 2024 race suggests that Biden lacks the humility and self-awareness that is key to real sobriety.

And then there’s Trump. He has always maintained that he doesn’t smoke or drink, for fear of ending up like his older brother, an alcoholic who died young. And while he has periodically taken Ambien, a sedative-hypnotic tightly controlled by the Drug Enforcement Administration, and while allegations of further drug use are rampant, Trump doesn’t come off like an active addict.

Instead, he’s a quintessential dry drunk. Feeling deprived, Trump has made a career of copping resentments, indulging in self-pity, and striking out in frustration at those who least deserve it. Members of A.A. are taught to be wary of exactly the “willpower” dry drunks like Trump pride themselves on; sobriety requires letting go of alcoholic impulses, not repressing them.

All of this comes to mind just about every time the president speaks. During his interview with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press Sunday, he later recalled, he was driven to rage by the sound of the rain on the roof. The man is nearly 80, and anyone with a modicum of serenity should be soothed and not enraged by the sound of rain.

But he also seemed to be scanning his mind for someone to blame for his discomfort, someone to hate. “They’re crooked,” he said of one of his imagined foes, “just like you’re crooked.” Welker calmly replied, “I’m not crooked.” Trump then shot back, “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid!” Before he stormed out, stepping on his mic, he added maniacally, “Thank you darling! Have a good time!” Whether he drinks or not, this is not a sober man.

Sobriety proceeds a day at a time, and it’s hard to know what Hunter Biden’s interior life is like these days.

On the one hand, Biden has exhibited real candor and willingness to help others in his recent tweets and interviews. On the other hand, it’s not clear how close he stays to the moral demands of true sobriety. “I know what I’ve done, I know the amends I have to make,” he now says. But Lunden Roberts, the mother of one of Hunter’s children, has written movingly and without rancor about raising their daughter in Arkansas while Biden first refused to acknowledge his child, then paid less than expected in support, then seemed to ghost his daughter. Making a complete amends to one’s children and partners is usually considered a first step toward lasting sobriety.

As Hunter Biden would surely be the first to attest, the path to sobriety is winding and difficult, and, as A.A. says, “We seek progress, not perfection.” Biden’s voice is welcome in the public sphere, and not for the zingers. Rather, he has opened the possibility—just the possibility—that with attention to our moral responsibilities we Americans might one day find a less furious, more honest, and more charitable way to live.

Last month, a federal judge tossed the federal criminal case against Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man who became nationally known last year after the Trump administration acknowledged having illegally deported him to the CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador along with a larger set of Latino men that seemed to have been randomly snatched up by federal agents despite the government’s evidence-free insistence that they were all hardened gang members.

All of these removals were illegal, but Ábrego García’s was most obviously, glaringly so, on account of the fact that an immigration judge had specifically ruled that he could not be returned to El Salvador, where he would face danger. After a separate federal judge ordered his return, the government dragged its feet for months, insisting absurdly it had no custody over him before abruptly flying him back and immediately hitting him with criminal human smuggling charges—which were dismissed under an extremely rare finding of vindictive prosecution.

That doesn’t mean the 30-year-old sheet metal apprentice is out of the woods. The government is still trying to deport him, having rejected his offer to be removed to Costa Rica and instead gunning to send him to Liberia, where he’s never been, after an effort to deport him to Uganda, where he’s also never been. Every time there’s a new twist in this saga, I see people asking the same basic questions: Are they being serious? Is the administration still expending resources, over a year-plus, in a fanatical attempt to screw over this one guy? Why?

I think there’s an answer, and it’s a different one from that of many of the administration’s other targets in its weaponization of its power. While Ábrego García’s case is often lumped in with the attempts to investigate or prosecute people like former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, former Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell, and Senator Mark Kelly, I think there are clear differences in both intent and result, which stem ultimately from an analysis of their relative power.

Naturally, each of these efforts is an outrage in its own right, and not just in a “violating our sacred norms and decorum” kind of way. The spurious attempted railroadings of James, Powell, and Kelly are attempts to wrestle control of parts of the government or civil society that Trump has not been able to fully take by force or subservience—local prosecutors, the central bank, and parts of the Senate, respectively. Every single one is a direct shot at the foundations of our system of government, just in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary.

These people, though, will ultimately all be fine. Each have gone into an incredibly high-profile and powerful role in government, and while they didn’t and shouldn’t have expected to be criminally investigated for their trouble, they knew they were to some extent playing the game, one that has only gotten more dangerous in the Trump era. For good or ill, elected officials and high government functionaries at all levels, particularly those who are pro-democracy and willing to do something about it, should be steeling themselves for an increased level of risk, perhaps more than they thought they signed up for. Politics these days is a perilous field (and those that aren’t prepared for that should step aside).

Ábrego García did not sign up for any such risk. Everything we know about him points to his being a relatively run-of-the-mill Maryland dad that—while having had some acute personal struggles at times in his life—seemed, until his detention, to be focused mainly on learning the sheet metal trade and raising his son. If he’s become a fixation of the federal government, it’s not really because of anything he personally did. Instead, he has become this idée fixe because of something that was done to him. Or, if you prefer, he’s now famous for what his travails have come to represent: The Millerite campaign of savagery is indiscriminate, it is sloppy, and the government is, in fact, making serious mistakes that enormously impact people’s lives. He is a living, high-stakes symbol of Trumpian misrule and this administration’s need to break its opponents on the rack of authoritarianism.

The admission of an “administrative error” that triggered Ábrego García’s removal to the notorious CECOT gulag remains one of the few times I can remember when this innately combative and contemptuous administration has acknowledged in any public forum that it made a significant mistake. This was all the more disorienting in the context of a situation where it was sending, without any acknowledged legal basis whatsoever, people to be held in kind-of-but-also-kind-of-not U.S. custody at a foreign mega-prison with no due process. The admission of Ábrego García’s unlawful deportation was a crack in a carefully constructed facade of righteously deployed power for which the administration has never forgiven him.

In that way, he has become the most acute example of this phenomenon—but certainly not the only one. Mahmoud Khalil certainly involved himself more in political life than Ábrego García did, but it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that he was a campus activist and negotiator at one university campus, admittedly one of the most high-profile sites of pro-Palestinian organizing. Still, he was little known outside that scene until he was actually detained. I do not in any way intend to minimize his dedication and his activism in saying that it seems clear the Trump administration did not engineer his arrest as a way to decapitate Palestinian activism or take a significant public opponent off the board.

As Khalil himself told me when I spoke with him for this magazine last year, he had expected to potentially incur the wrath of the administration (and he certainly did). He never considered that his activism would draw the individualized attention of the federal government, and while he doesn’t at all regret his work, this is a level of consequence neither he nor anyone had really gamed out. Rather, his detention was a signal—you might think you’re not a big enough fish to warrant a heavy-handed response, but that response might come anyway.

To this you can add the so-called Broadview Six, an assortment of individuals that include a congressional candidate, her aide, several local elected officials and candidates, and a musician. The Six were all charged with felonies, including conspiracy, after a September protest outside an ICE holding facility in Broadview, Illinois, in which an ICE vehicle was mildly damaged. The defendant pool was whittled down to four people facing misdemeanors before the case was dismissed altogether amid questions about federal prosecutors’ conduct with the grand jury. Still, the months of uncertainty and legal bills took a toll on all of them, just as the specter of prosecution and deportation have taken a toll on Khalil and Ábrego García, who are not insulated by high public office and connections.

These committed efforts to throw the massive weight of the federal government against not just potent political enemies but individuals who, at least in the case of Ábrego García, don’t seem to have any public political bearing at all are not coming out of nowhere. It is a tried and true method among authoritarians, of making clear to the population that while any given person might be unlikely to find themselves in these terrifying crosshairs, it absolutely can happen to you, and so maybe you should work assiduously to avoid drawing that unwelcome attention.

Most anyone who’s had even a cursory brush with the adversarial power of the state knows how jarring it can be, whether that’s being pulled over or audited or investigated in some way. These interactions might be quickly resolved, but while they’re ongoing, the awesome power of the state and the stark imbalance between you and it put themselves in acute relief. Now imagine that this stretches beyond any one particular interaction and becomes an all-encompassing monthslong ordeal where every legal victory against the state’s vexations leads to the government doubling down again and again, with the goal of depleting resources and willpower even when putatively unsuccessful. It is the legal procedural equivalent of a head on a stake outside the castle doors: a warning to the others, to everyone.

While Trump’s malicious series of attempted prosecutions and investigations so far have been framed as an abject failure—and, from a pure legal perspective, they have been a litany of embarrassing disasters that have damaged the Justice Department indelibly—it’s quite possible that, at chilling speech and political action, they’ve been more successful than we can see on the surface. That is a Trump legacy that will be difficult to repair.

You know already that President Donald Trump is on a rampage to build hideous oversized structures in Washington, D.C. (the Epstein Ballroom, the Arc de Trump) and to deface existing structures using exorbitant no-bid contracts. We got some good news this past weekend when a judge made Trump take “THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND” off the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. I only wish the judge further required the president to hang the removed letters on the clubhouse portico at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, rearranged anagrammatically into UNHAT DAMP NJ TODDLER.

What you may not know is that the Trump administration is also on a tear to unload government buildings that it’s judged to be all cost and no value. The General Services Administration, which is the federal government’s real estate arm, is selling off government real estate at fire-sale prices into a historically depressed commercial market. These prices are lousy even within the context of the post-Covid office-space glut, making the GSA look very foolish as it claims thrifty stewardship of the taxpayer dollar.

I’ve been primarily concerned about the fate of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which the GSA designated last year for “accelerated disposition.” Gray Brechin, founder of the nonprofit Living New Deal, described the Cohen Building to me last September as “a kind of Sistine Chapel of the New Deal” because of its murals by Philip Guston, Seymour Fogel, Ethel and Jenne Magafan—and, most especially, Ben Shahn, whose dry frescoes along both sides of a 70-foot lobby corridor, “The Meaning of Social Security,” Shahn judged “the best work I’ve done.” (To read my earlier pieces on the Cohen building and the Shahns, click here, here, here, and here. These were followed up in, among other publications, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and USA Today.)

I won’t tug your lapel too long about the Cohen, which has yet to be sold, because my subject today is those buildings that the Trump administration has sold already, most especially the Old Post Office Building, which Trump leased during his first administration and refurbished as a hotel. The Trump International Hotel became a kleptocratic vortex before Trump sold it at the end of his first term well above market value. Now Trump is poised to repurchase not just the lease but the entire building at a heavy discount, shredding whatever remains of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses as he uses the presidency to expand his fortune at a rate of $1 billion or more per year.

More on that in a moment. Permit me first to update you about the Cohen building.

Neither Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, nor her staff knew that the Cohen building housed precious New Deal art before she inserted into a January 2025 water resources bill a provision requiring that it be sold off “no later than two years” after being vacated (which has not yet occurred). Such ignorance is astonishing given that the Cohen lies a mere two blocks from the United States Capitol, but I wouldn’t call it atypical of how the Republican congressional majority operates.

After Ernst learned about the art, she said in a written statement: “It speaks volumes that only 2 percent of the folks who were actually paid to work at the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building were showing up to see its murals in person.” Ernst here misconstrues a low occupancy rate attributable to GSA misallocation (the main tenants, Voice of America and its parent agency, used only a small part of the building) to be an entirely made-up absentee rate for supposed civil service malingerers. “Given that fact,” Ernst continued, “let the property’s buyer decide its artwork’s fate.” Which is exactly what the Cohen building’s defenders fear, even though the law requires that New Deal art remain public property even after the building where it resides is sold. These days we can never be sure the executive branch will pay any heed to what the law says.

In recent months, various Democratic members of Congress have walked those two blocks from the Capitol to tour the Cohen building’s artworks, and we’ve seen some murmurings from Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas and others, prodded by Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, and Mary Okin, assistant director of the nonprofit Living New Deal, about introducing legislation to block the Cohen’s sale. On April 21, Representative Chellie Pingree, Democrat of Maine, offered an amendment to an appropriations bill for financial services, general government, and related agencies requiring public release of a GSA feasibility study, initiated by the Biden administration and buried by the Trump administration, on refurbishing the Cohen building. As I reported previously, the study proposed a $1 billion green renovation of the Cohen building to make it “a flagship in the federal government portfolio,” including restoration of the murals, which “add a sense of cultural identity in the building that remains from tenant to tenant.” Amen.

Pingree’s amendment to make public this taxpayer-funded study failed, as Democratic amendments tend to in the Republican-majority House. But two Republicans, Representatives Ryan Zinke of Montana and Michael Simpson of Idaho, voted with Pingree. “I was glad to see I convinced a couple of my [GOP] colleagues,” Pingree told me afterward. “I got pretty close.” It gave her hope, Pingree said, that Congress would “keep the building off the market.”

I hope soon to have more to report on that. Now let’s move on to those government buildings the GSA has sold already.

Three of them are in Washington, and the first two, like the Cohen, have been designated for “accelerated disposition.” In March, the GSA’s own Regional Office Building was sold (to the residential developer Dalian Development) for $24.26 million. That worked out to $26 per square foot, or less than one-tenth its market value. In May, the GSA sold the Liberty Loan Building (to Satvik “Vinny” Raj, founder and managing director of Digilent Consulting) for $17 million. That works out to $98 per square foot, which is somewhat better, but still about one-fifth the average sale price for a D.C. office building in the current depressed market. Why the government insists on disposing of these buildings at so inopportune a moment is anybody’s guess. (I’m indebted to the Washington Business Journal for details on these sales, which went unreported in The Washington Post.)

The third building, which is not on the accelerated disposition list, is the Old Post Office Building. It sold earlier this month for $80 million, or $172 per square foot. Which sounds like a big improvement on the GSA Annex and the Liberty Loan building until you remember that the Old Post Office is a gorgeous Romanesque revival structure completed in 1899; that a mere 10 years ago Trump spent $200 million, or $430 per square foot, to convert the Old Post Office into a luxury hotel; and that Trump sold the hotel five years ago for a reported $375 million—and that was just for the lease, because until last week the GSA retained ownership of the building and the land. In current dollars, Trump got paid for the renovated Old Post Office $452 million, or $972 million per square foot—again, just for the lease.

That means, among other things, that even if the Old Post Office Building’s new buyer gets its asking price of $400 million, the building and the land will sell for less in 2026 than just the lease sold for in 2021. And who’s the likeliest buyer? According to The Wall Street Journal, Eric Trump has been in talks to repurchase the Old Post Office Building since mid-January 2025. Trump wants his Kleptorium back, at a discount.

When Trump bought the Old Post Office lease back in 2012, Steven Pearlstein observed in The Washington Post that the likely outcome would be, for Trump, yet another appearance in bankruptcy court. Trump had bad luck with hotels, having previously gone bust with the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, the storied Plaza Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, and the Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts. Pearlstein thought the GSA was crazy to lease the Old Post Office to a screw-up like Trump. He didn’t know the half of it.

As he’d done many times before, Trump overpaid for the Old Post Office, agreeing to an inflation-adjusted annual lease payment of $3 million plus the $200 million renovation. Pearlstein was quite right that this would compel Trump to charge room rates well above those of his hotel competitors. What Pearlstein couldn’t know was that Trump would become president of the United States shortly after his Trump International Hotel opened on Pennsylvania Avenue, allowing it to become, as I wrote in May 2022, Washington’s premier shakedown venue. Foreign governments spent $3.8 million at the hotel; the Secret Service spent more than $200,000; the Republican National Committee spent $3,000 per month; Trump’s inaugural committee spent $1 million (prompting a lawsuit from the D.C. attorney general that Trump later settled for $750,000); and so on.

But Trump had paid so extravagantly for the Old Post Office that even with all this baksheesh pouring in, the Trump International still lost about $70 million in operating expenses. Then he lost the 2020 election, which meant he no longer needed a Kleptorium. Trump sold the Trump International Hotel for $375 million, pocketing $100 million in profit. The $375 million price tag was, Jonathan O’Connell reported in The Washington Post, the most anybody had ever paid for a Washington hotel, which was all the more remarkable because

a) this was a money-losing venture

and

b) the building and the land were still owned by the federal government.

(I recount the story up to here, in greater detail, in my May 2022 piece.)

The new owners, who scraped Trump’s name off the hotel and reopened it in 2022 as a Waldorf Astoria hotel, were a Miami-based investment group called CGI Merchant Group. It isn’t clear why CGI Merchant Group got into this, but the trade publication The Real Deal last year called the firm “financially embattled” because of various real estate investments gone sour. To no one’s surprise, CGI Merchant Group in 2024 had to sell the Waldorf Astoria for $100 million at a foreclosure auction.

The purchaser at foreclosure was a private equity firm called MSD Partners (now BDT & MSD Partners). MSD Partners had put up most of the money for CGI Merchant Group to buy Trump’s unprofitable hotel in the first place; of the $375 million purchase price, $285 million came from MSD Partners. After CGI Merchant Group defaulted on that $285 million loan, BDT & MSD Partners decided, what the hell, let’s kick in another $100 million and take it off their hands. And so they became the owners of Trump’s unprofitable former hotel—or rather, the owners of a lot of fancy renovations and a lease on same. Now GSA has come along and sold the building itself to BDT & MSD for an additional $80 million.

I don’t know who’s a more generous soul—BDT & MSD for acquiring this dog of an enterprise, or GSA for handing over title at so low a price.

We know why GSA would be charitable; these folks work for President Donald Trump, who wants to repurchase the Old Post Office, this time at a less burdensome price. But why would BDT & MSD Partners be charitable? Because when Trump was trying to unload the Old Post Office back in 2021, MSD Partners’ chief executive was a Palm Beach neighbor named John Phelan. (Phelan left the firm in June 2022, seven months after the sale.) Phelan is one of Trump’s biggest financial supporters. In April 2024, Phelan threw a Trump fundraiser at his Aspen vacation home, with contribution tiers rising from $25,000 to $500,000. Phelan himself donated $927,000 to Trump’s 2024 campaign.

Shortly after that election, Trump named Phelan to be secretary of the Navy, despite Phelan’s notable lack of armed forces experience in either a military or a civilian capacity. Experts told the Associated Press that Phelan was chosen because he wouldn’t give Trump any pushback. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly grew jealous of Phelan’s closeness to the president, and in April Hegseth fired Phelan, apparently annoyed that Phelan was currying favor with Trump by proposing to create an expensive new “Trump Class” of battleships. This may be the single instance in which Hegseth fired someone from the Pentagon who was actually unqualified.

BDT & MSD Partners, I’ll wager, would very much like to sell the Waldorf-Astoria at a price that lets them recoup their investment in the property, which (between the unpaid portion of its loan to CGI Merchant Group, its foreclosure purchase, and its purchase from GSA of the building and land) probably isn’t much lower than its $400 million asking price. Indeed, given operating expenses on the less-than-thriving hotel, BDT & MSD may be out even more than $400 million.

If Trump pays $400 million to buy back the Old Post Office, he’ll get it for $52 million less, after inflation, than he sold it for five years ago—and this time he’ll have the building and the land. That’s a pretty good deal! But if I know Trump, he’ll demand a lower price than $400 million, leaning heavily on his knowledge that the GSA sold it to BDT & MSD Partners for a mere $80 million and pretending not to remember MSD Partners’ previous exertions to bail him out. He has no time to delve into such petty details. And anyway, he gave that guy the Navy secretary gig and he blew it. Trump probably doesn’t remember how. He’s a very busy man.

Imagine you were buying a car, and the only thing you knew about it was the color. Not the horsepower, not the number of cylinders, not the options; none of that. Just the color.

Obviously, you wouldn’t make such a purchase. You’d demand to know more, and quite rightly so. Well, voters choose candidates on the basis of scant information all the time, especially when it comes to the economic realities that obtain in this country. This is largely the Democrats’ fault. The Republicans don’t want people to know these facts. The Democrats should, but they don’t talk about them nearly enough. Now that America has freshly minted its first actual trillionaire in Elon Musk and Donald Trump has made working people’s lives far harder than they already were with his pointless, gas-price-raising little war, those of us who do know those realities need to demand of Democrats that they talk more about them.

Before I get into it, let me say clearly: I’m not calling voters stupid. It isn’t their fault they don’t know this stuff—it’s, as I said, the Democrats’, and to some extent the media’s, which doesn’t talk about these things enough because they aren’t “news.” People do know in their bones that the U.S. economic system is rigged—although, as we shall see, they generally have no idea how rigged.

OK. So: Let’s start with the fact that the top 1 percent of Americans now own about 32 percent of the wealth. You may know this. This one fact does get reported or mentioned pretty frequently. It’s a shocking number, though. It’s not OK, and it’s not normal. Look at this historical chart from the authoritative St. Louis Fed. In 1990, it was around 22 percent. It’s been above 30 percent since 2014. And it just keeps going up—except, interestingly, for three dips, two during George W. Bush’s presidency and one during Trump’s first term; not because they were warriors on behalf of income equality but because they tanked the economy.

A pretty big chunk of that 32 percent is owned by not just the 1 percent, but the 0.1 percent. That’s about 135,000 households. I couldn’t find precise current numbers for 2025–26 on deadline, but I did find this study, from 2013, by the formidable duo of Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. In that year, the top 0.1 percent owned about 22 percent of the wealth. Again, this is not normal. It’s not “just the way things are.” The last time the top 0.1 percent owned that much wealth was—of course—back in 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression.

Trump wants to take America back to the 1950s, does he? In this one respect, we should all wish he would. From the end of World War II until the late 1980s, the top 0.1 percent owned around 10 to 12 percent of the wealth. The current madness started after Ronald Reagan’s two big tax cuts. (The famous joke about everything about the United States going bad after the Reagan presidency isn’t quite as hyperbolic as it sounds.)

Now—you may consider the above information old hat. If you read someone like me on a regular basis, you’re more likely to know this sort of stuff. But people—voters—generally do not. In fact, what they don’t know is astonishing.

A week or so ago, I tripped across this video on YouTube. It’s old—it’s from 2013. So the reality described in it has only gotten worse. The narrator starts like this: “There’s a chart I saw recently that I can’t get out of my head. A Harvard business professor and economist asked more than 5,000 Americans how they thought wealth was distributed in the United States.”

They thought the top 20 percent probably owned around 58 percent of the wealth. Then they were asked what they thought the ideal distribution should be. They thought that ideally, the top 20 percent should own around 33 percent of the wealth. The actual distribution, in 2013? The top 20 percent owned 82 percent of the wealth.

This was 2013, but in the intervening years, people’s perceptions haven’t changed much. I did find a study from this year in which researchers asked people how many times wealthier an average member of the top 10 percent is than someone in the remaining 90 percent of the population. People said about 13.5 times wealthier. The actual answer is precisely twice that, 27 times.

You get the idea. So, what does all this mean for Democrats?

I suppose some would say, well, a few things. First, they need to disenthrall themselves from the idea that talking about all this stuff is too “left-wing.” Undoubtedly, such rhetoric will be labeled that by Republicans and elements of the media. But so what? It’s just reality. This country is on an unsustainable economic path. It must be changed. You don’t change things by being afraid of how you’re going to be attacked. Nonconfrontational Democrats are, to be blunt, not fit for purpose.

Others would contend that even if the mass of voters knew these numbers and more, they wouldn’t care; it wouldn’t move them, and they wouldn’t vote on the basis of them. I think that too is cowardly nonsense. The study I cited above, in which people’s ideal income distribution is well to the left of where they think it is and way to the left of where it actually is? (And by the way, I’ve seen other such studies, and they all show the same thing.) That suggests to me that most people would welcome a message of income redistribution.

And by the way—and this too is a crucial point that Democrats need to get through their skulls—if that many people hold that view, it’s not even “left.” It’s mainstream. Democrats need to accept this and act accordingly.

Also, always remember: Be suspicious of people who tell you such and such an issue won’t move voters. One question in a poll or focus group isn’t the same thing as a charismatic candidate making something the centerpiece of his or her campaign in speech after speech. And besides, no candidate has to move “voters,” generally and generically. Candidates have to persuade small, decisive percentages of voters that they will fight for their interests.

So, as these billionaires become trillionaires, as their share of the wealth grows ever greater, as some of them express open contempt for democracy itself, it’s time that we demand that the 2028 Democratic aspirants be willing to say: “My fellow Americans, if you elect me and give me a Democratic House and Senate, we’re going to take some money away from the billionaires and give it to you.” How on earth is that a losing message?

And while they’re at it, they need to tell Americans the economic facts of our society, over and over and over until they start to hit home. Republicans want voters to think only, “My, what a pretty red car.” Democrats have to tell them what’s in the engine.